Old Testament Survey: Completed Series

I’m excited that Mars Hill Press now has another completed series of Bible studies: Old Testament Survey. That makes about 2 1/2 completed series on this website, including a complete series on the Gospel of Luke and a series about halfway done on the Book of Daniel.

The Old Testament Survey series is a little different from the other two, as you will notice if you compare them at all. There are two main differences.

1. Old Testament Survey has shorter lessons.
2. The lessons in Old Testament survey are organized by means of a series of boldfaced questions.

Both of these features have to do with the primary design of this series of lessons, which is not necessarily for people to use for private study (although I think they are useful for that purpose) but rather for Bible class teachers to take into the classroom with them. Assuming your church Bible class will last about 45 minutes, the briefer lesson is supposed to give you a little bit more material—but not too much more material—than you’d be able to cover in such a class period. In other words, I think you’ll have plenty to talk about, but there’s not so much material as in the Luke and Daniel lessons, so you won’t have to think so much about what to leave out.

The boldface questions are designed for the teacher to ask the class participants. Of course, you as a teacher might use these teaching guides in other ways, but they’re designed so that you can read over them a time or two before class and then take that material into class and just sort of read it off, or at least read off the questions to help generate some class discussion.

Actually with the hyperlinks within the lessons and the Additional Resources at the end of each lesson, usually with a few videos (especially from the Bible Project), there’s quite a bit in each lesson helping the teacher prepare for class. And these lessons could be used as guides for private study.

It’s a survey of the Old Testament, a very selective survey. There are 13 lessons to correspond to a typical quarter of Bible classes for a Christian congregation. It’s hard to cover the Old Testament in 13 lessons, so I didn’t really even try. Rather, after a couple introductory lessons on why a Christian should have a concern for the Old Testament, I’ve selected some of the famous chapters from different parts of the Old Testament (Pentateuch, history, Psalms, wisdom, prophets) to try to help orient readers to the types of things the Old Testament talks about.

I hope you’re able to find some use for these lessons.