The idea that Isaiah is the key for properly ordering the books of the Bible took some time to realize. The first time I thought to match the chapters of Isaiah with the books of the Bible I assumed the traditional book order. In fact, the concept of book order wasn't even on my radar screen in those days.
It was sometime between 2000 and 2002 that I was reading the Bible one afternoon and landed in Isaiah 40. As I read this familiar passage I couldn't get past verse 3.
13 Isaiah 40:3
3The voice of him who cries in the wilderness, Prepare the way of Yahvah, make straight in the desert a highway for our god.
What stood out for the first time was the realization that John the Baptist quotes this verse in the four Gospels and the first of those Gospels is the 40th book of the Bible. I thought it odd that the first major person on the scene in the 40th book of the Bible would end up quoting from the 40th chapter of Isaiah, especially given the fact Isaiah has 66 chapters and the Bible has 66 books.
The idea began to form in my mind that each book in the Bible might uniquely match a chapter in Isaiah. To begin testing the idea I turned to the book of Matthew and found the quote from Isaiah 40.
41 Matthew 3:3
3For it was he of whom it was said by the prophet Isaiah, The voice which cries in the wilderness, Prepare the way of master, and straighten his highways.
I thought this was a good match between Isaiah 40 and Matthew so I began looking for other matches. I remembered some of the wording in Isaiah 66 is similar to vocabulary at the end of Revelation. I found the two passages and realized they are nearly identical.
13 Isaiah 66:22
22For as the new skies and the new land which I will make will remain before me, says Yahvah, so your sons and your name will remain.
66 Revelation 21:1
1And I saw new skies and a new land; for the first skies and the first land had passed away; and the sea was no more.
I also thought this was a good match, but as I continued looking for other matches it was difficult to find much else. After a few days time I gave up and figured it was an oddity that Isaiah 40 and 66 match the books of Matthew and Revelation.
Several years later, in December of 2004, I was reading my Bible and turned again to Isaiah 40. As I began reading the idea to match the chapters and books came back to mind. Despite wanting to try again I began to reject the idea since it did not work before.
Then I remembered a book I had read somewhere in the intervening time that changed everything. The First Edition of the New Testament, by David Trobisch, lays out how there must have been an original Greek New Testament, the "first edition," that all subsequent Greek New Testaments copied or were at least modeled after. The reason is nearly all Greek manuscripts in existence today have the same book order. This means the book order was set in the "first edition" and followed by the rest.
Mr. Trobisch goes on to argue for a return to the Greek book order in the second half of the book. In fact, he uses scripture to demonstrate that the Greek book order is more coherent than the English order. By the end of the book I was sold, but the real lesson was the new understanding that the Bible has not always been in the order I had used since my childhood.
So there I was, trying to figure out why the chapters of Isaiah had not matched the books of the Bible and I realized the problem. The English book order is not the correct order, David had shown a better one in the Greek order, and if I reversed the original idea and matched the books against the chapters, instead of the other way around, I would end up with a book order defined in Isaiah (assuming of course that it would work).
So I turned to the beginning of Isaiah and started reading chapter 1 for material that might match Genesis. I found reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from Genesis 19.
13 Isaiah 1:9
9Except Yahvah of hosts had left to us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom, and we should have been like Gomorrah.
I thought, okay, that's a match, what about Isaiah 2 and Exodus. I began reading and was pleased to find an obvious match.
13 Isaiah 2:2-3
2And it will come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of Yahvah's house will be established above the mountains, and will be exalted above the hills; and all nations will look to it.
3And many people will go and say, Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahvah, to the house of the god of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for out of Zion will go forth the law, and the word of Yahvah from Jerusalem.
All the overarching themes of Exodus are mentioned in this brief quote in Isaiah 2. The mountain, the law, the house of God, and even the nations. Okay, another match.
I then read Isaiah 3 hoping to find material related to Leviticus, but I didn't see the correlation. On a later date I reread Leviticus and realized the robe placed on Aaron at his ordination as High Priest matches the story in Isaiah 3 really well.
I found material matching the book of Numbers in Isaiah 4. Remember the cloud by day and fire by night in Numbers 9? Isaiah 4:5 uses the same imagery.
13 Isaiah 4:5
5And Yahvah will create on every dwelling place of mount Zion, all around, a cloud by day, and the smoke and shining of a flaming fire by night; for the glory of Yahvah will be a shelter over all.
I continued that afternoon through Isaiah 9 or 10, matching books along the way. Each match was fairly obvious, but often added to, challenged or even changed what I thought I knew about the Bible.
Over the next several months I worked to match all of the Old Testament books to Isaiah in my free time. The order is quite different in places from any other known book order and took lots of reading, prayer and contemplation at times. Other sections flew together with little difficulty.
My main tool for this process were 3" x 5" note cards. I made one for each chapter in Isaiah and taped them to the wall. Then I made a note card for each book. Each time I matched a book and chapter I taped the note card with the book name under the corresponding note card with the Isaiah chapter.
Through a process of elimination I was able to finish the Old Testament. It was a good feeling to have those books matched to the first 39 chapters of Isaiah. That evening I had dinner with a friend, Phil, who had been keeping tabs on my study. After dinner the bill came along with a couple fortune cookies. My fortune read "A job well begun is half done," and in red letters no less. It was amazing to think that just that day I had finished the book order for the first "half" of the Bible, and then would receive this fortune.
I moved on to the New Testament, eager to finish this pass through Isaiah and the Bible. The Gospels went together quickly and made plenty of sense. They maintain their traditional order with one change. Can you guess what's different? The answer is John moves from last to first in the order since it belongs "In the beginning" and matches Isaiah 40 better than Matthew.
Acts follows the Gospels, as expected, with a nice match to Isaiah 44 and I already knew Revelation matches Isaiah 66. It was time to work the epistles. Trouble was I couldn't seem to match the letters of the New Testament to Isaiah, other than Isaiah 45 and Philippians.
After days of spinning wheels I finally asked Phil if he would lend an extra pair of eyes. I figured I was missing something obvious and if we could find a match or two I would be on my way to slowly solving the rest of the book order matches in the New Testament. Boy was I surprised at what happened next.
Phil wanted to review why I had matched Philippians to Isaiah 45, so we read through Isaiah 45 out loud. As we were reading Phil saw imagery that reminded him of Paul and Silas in prison. This seemed strangely unrelated, but we turned to Acts anyhow and found the story in Acts 16. We were stunned when we realized the city where Paul and Silas were thrown in jail was none other than Philippi.
After a few moments of cognitive dissonance, we realized that if Philippians matches Isaiah 45, and Isaiah 45 matches Acts 16, then Philippians also matches Acts 16. And if Philippians matches Paul's visit to Philippi in Acts 16, then perhaps the rest of Paul's travel itinerary in Acts is a map for the book order of the epistles of the New Testament.
To test this idea we read forward in Acts. The next town Paul visited was Thessalonica. So we put First Thessalonians after Philippians and compared it with Isaiah 46. It was a match. In the same fashion we used the rest of Acts to place all the letters of the New Testament. When Paul visited an individual or place that did not receive an epistle we substituted an epistle to an individual. With this strategy we were able to place the rest of the epistles in one sitting. Since that time only one change has been made, Romans and Hebrews switched places a few days later.
Phil and I had a guest visiting from out of town who watched the New Testament book order come together that afternoon. Our guest had been in China on missions and the next day while touring him around town we stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Sitting there, having completed the book order for the New Testament the day before, I remembered the "half done" fortune cookie from the day the Old Testament book order was finished. I told the story to our guest and explained I was curious to see what the fortune cookies would say after lunch.
The bill came with the anticipated fortune cookies. I opened my cookie and read... "You should be able to undertake and complete anything you desire." I thought, wow, that's two for two. A fortune about "half way" at the half way point and a fortune about "complete" at the end of the first pass. This can't be random can it?