This study reads Scripture in the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB) alongside the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The Old Testament is overwhelmingly Hebrew, but a handful of passages are written in Imperial Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian empire — Daniel 2:4b–7:28 (roughly half of Daniel), Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26 (the Persian-court correspondence), Jeremiah 10:11 (a one-verse polemic against idols), and the two-word place name in Genesis 31:47 (Jegar-sahadutha). Aramaic is also preserved in the New Testament where the Gospel writers retain Jesus’s actual words in transliteration: Abba, Talitha cumi, Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani, Maranatha. The LSB is a literal English translation in the NASB tradition, distinctive especially for restoring the divine name Yahweh where the underlying text reads YHWH, preserving doulos as “slave” rather than softening to “servant,” and rendering disputed phrases (obedience of faith, pistis Christou) with their original ambiguity intact. The study pairs each English passage with the underlying original-language text, word-by-word breakdowns of key terms, grammar and argument notes, OT-NT connections, and the LSB-specific translation choices worth pausing on.
Each chapter is its own page with tabbed sections grouped by the author’s logical units. Gold-underlined words in the text are clickable — they jump to the matching Key Words entry below, which glows briefly so you can find your landing. Select any text to highlight it or add a private note; the floating ✎ button at the lower right opens your notes panel. Highlights and notes are saved in your browser, per chapter.
Authorship attributions follow scholarly convention: traditional where the church has spoken with one voice (Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John); transparent where the matter is disputed (Hebrews is shown as Author Unknown, the Psalms as David and others). The aim is honest scholarship, not pretended certainty.
Where to begin. The 66 books are arranged below in their canonical order, Genesis through Revelation, the same order any printed Bible follows. But the books were written for different readers in different centuries, and they reward different entry points. A few suggestions:
For a first read of the New Testament, begin with Mark (the shortest gospel, urgent and narrative) and then Luke — you will see the same story told twice with different concerns. For doctrinal core, begin with Romans; this study was built around Romans first and the depth there sets the bar for the rest of the project. Galatians is the Reader's Digest of Romans — six tight chapters of the same gospel argument.
For an Old Testament gateway, begin with Genesis 1-12 (creation through Abraham, the seedbed of every later thread), then jump to Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 — both read like Christian sermons centuries before Christ. For wisdom under suffering, Job and Ecclesiastes. For the prophet Jesus quoted most, Isaiah.
For tracing how the New Testament uses the Old, the bonus Cross References page (linked at the bottom) is a bidirectional index of every OT citation across the entire study — click any verse to jump to either side of the connection.
Typology threads tying Old Testament seeds to their flowering in Christ — from the serpent-crusher of Genesis 3:15 to the tabernacle that became flesh in John 1:14. Each thread is shown in four stages: OT seed, the linguistic thread (Hebrew root, LXX vocabulary), NT fulfillment, and why it matters. The LSB’s literal rendering of Yahweh and other Hebrew-OT vocabulary makes the linguistic seams visible across both testaments.
Open Threads →A bidirectional index of every Old Testament reference cited across the entire study — organized by OT book and chapter, with links forward to where the reference is discussed and back to the original passage. Use it to trace a single Hebrew verse through every place it surfaces in apostolic teaching, or to see at a glance which OT books shape any given New Testament chapter.
Open Cross References →