Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

Whether we’re reli­gious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Tes­ta­ment and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protes­tant tra­di­tion. Even if you’ve nev­er read a sin­gle page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books con­tain: the sto­ries of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the cre­ation in Gen­e­sis; the plagues and Moses part­ing the Red Sea in Exo­dus; the var­i­ous depic­tions of Jesus in the Gospels that define his pop­u­lar image; the apoc­a­lyp­tic grotes­queries of Rev­e­la­tion. That’s even like­li­er to be true if you watch Hochela­ga, the YouTube chan­nel that just came out with a new video explain­ing all those sto­ries and every­thing in between.

The result is long, to be sure, but not as long as you might expect: Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny man­ages to cov­er the 66 books of the Bible in two hours, the length of an ordi­nary fea­ture film. For visu­als, he draws upon the his­to­ry of West­ern art, whose con­nec­tions with Chris­tian­i­ty and pen­chant for depict­ing the reli­gion’s cen­tral events goes with­out say­ing.

In the case of bib­li­cal fig­ures like Jon­ah, Job, or Lot’s wife (before or after her con­ver­sion into a pil­lar of salt), we’ve devel­oped our own men­tal images at least through cul­tur­al osmo­sis, informed or not by the visions of Renais­sance mas­ters. But how many of us can call so eas­i­ly scenes from the books of Oba­di­ah, Hag­gai, or Phile­mon up in our mind’s eye?

This video may prove most help­ful in pro­vid­ing a “big pic­ture” of the Bible, allow­ing view­ers with no expe­ri­ence of bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship to place iso­lat­ed episodes to which they’ve heard ref­er­ences all their lives in con­text with each oth­er. And yet, it’s also entire­ly pos­si­ble that they’ll come out of these two hours won­der­ing to what extent all these parts real­ly fit togeth­er in the first place. Col­lect­ed from mate­r­i­al orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten over cen­turies and in var­i­ous forms, not to men­tion passed through the vagaries of trans­la­tion, the Bible could hard­ly be expect­ed to present itself with pol­ished coher­ence. Whether or not you believe it con­tains the word of God, you could well feel ready, after Hochela­ga’s overview, to grap­ple with its text in all its lin­guis­tic rich­ness, its sur­pris­ing con­tra­dic­tions, and its moral grandeur — as well as its more-than-occa­sion­al strange­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Why Real Bib­li­cal Angels Are Creepy, Beast­ly, and Hard­ly Angel­ic

What Hap­pened to Jesus’ Twelve Dis­ci­ples After the Bible — It Wasn’t Pret­ty

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Inves­ti­ga­tion into a Sur­pris­ing­ly High Body Count

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.