This is the introduction to The Bible in Fewer Words Podcast by Carole and Steve Wells, where we discuss how the podcast came to be and what we are hoping to achieve with it.

The Bible is a difficult book to read. It contains dozens of books, by different authors, written for different audiences, at different times, in languages that few modern readers can understand. Many of its stories seem bizarre, repetitive, pointless and confusing to modern readers. It includes poetry, genealogies, and even many commandments that are ignored by everyone, including most believers.

And yet the Bible is also a very important book. Indeed, no other book has had such a profound effect on our civilization. And it continues to affect us today. So we should all be familiar with its contents.

But not everyone has the time or the patience to read the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Which is why I created “The Bible in Fewer Words.” It contains the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, but in fewer words.

Well, that’s not quite true. It doesn’t include the whole Bible. I’ve left out the boring, repetitious, and uninteresting stuff. And, since the Bible often uses a hundred words when ten would do, the word count can be greatly reduced without sacrificing the substance.

First Chronicles is a good example. No one reads the first nine chapters of that book, which is just one long genealogy. And the rest of the book isn’t of much interest either, since it repeats the stories that were already told in the books of Samuel. So First Chronicles can be reduced to very few words indeed – just a note about the genealogy and the already-told stories.

Of course, not everyone will agree with my decisions about what to include and what to leave out, which is as it should be since these are necessarily subjective in nature. I encourage the reader to refer to the corresponding Bible verses to compare my summary of the text that is included, as well as the text that I have left out. I have provided superscripted verse numbers to facilitate this.

I hope that this book will help those who would like to read the Bible, but who just can’t find the time – or who don’t want to waste the time reading such a long, and often boring, book.