Back in October of 2009, Daniel Bartholomew and I announced our ScriptureLog project, an open source plugin that turns WordPress into a collaborative scripture study platform.  At that time only we only had The Book of Mormon available.

Then in November, we released an update to add the Old Testament.

When we released the Book of Mormon, I had taken the time to develop a Book of Mormon outline, and I wanted to outline the Old Testament as well.

I started looking online for some good Old Testament outlines to use as a reference, and while I found a number, none were really what I wanted.

So, I began to review numerous articles on the Old Testament to help me understand each book better, and I went through the entire Old Testament chapter by chapter, and often page by page, comparing what I was reading to the articles and identifying ways to group and relate the parts.

In addition to study, I prayed frequently that Heavenly Father would help me to understand and organize an outline that would be useful for me and others; simple enough to make the book more understandable and approachable without  oversimplifying.

The resulting outline was built into the plugin, but I quickly realized that I needed to create a printable version.

So, here’s the final outline in PDF format that can be downloaded and printed by anyone who finds it useful.

An Outline of The Old Testament

[Edit 01/03/2011 – you can find the most recent revision of the outline, as well as outlines for other books of scripture, at http://scripturelog.com/outlines .]

I’ve learned a great deal through this process and have grown to both understand and love the Old Testament more than I ever have before.  Even if in the end the outline is only really useful to me, it’s been worth it.

(There is also a revised and simplified version of my Outline of the Textual Structure of the Book of Mormon for those interested)