Books about outsiders
Each one is about someone on the outside — an enemy city, a foreign widow, a people marked for deletion, a man being sent back — and about what was done with them. They do not all end the same way. Each one is short enough to read in a sitting, and none of them are here to be finished.
6 books · 393 verses · World English Bible, copied not composed
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Jonah
A prophet, and a city he wanted destroyed
God sends him to Nineveh. He pays for a ship to Tarshish instead, and the rest of the book is God being merciful anyway.
“more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between their right hand and their left hand”
Jonah 4:11Why it is hereIt ends on a question God asks Jonah, and Jonah never answers.
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Ruth
A widow, a harvest, and a way back
A famine sends a family abroad, and its men die there. A foreign daughter-in-law refuses to leave, and walks into a town where she will call herself a foreigner.
“where you go, I will go”
Ruth 1:16Why it is hereIt is the quiet counterpart to Jonah: the outsider nobody had to take in, taken in.
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Esther
An empire, an edict, and a name never spoken
A Jewish girl becomes queen of Persia, and a decree goes out to destroy her people on a fixed date.
“Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
Esther 4:14Why it is hereGod is never named in it — not once in 167 verses. The site counts, rather than tells you.
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Obadiah
Twenty-one verses against a brother
Twenty-one verses, addressed to Edom — whom it calls a brother — for standing on the other side while strangers cast lots for Jerusalem.
“you were like one of them”
Obadiah 11Why it is hereIts opening verses share whole phrases with Jeremiah 49. The machine finds them, not us.
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Nahum
The other book about Nineveh
Jonah went to this city and it was spared, and he was furious about it. This book is a vision about the same city, and it does not end that way.
“a stronghold in the day of trouble”
Nahum 1:7Why it is hereBoth books share wording with the same sentence about God, and each keeps different words of it.
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Philemon
A letter about one man, who is being sent back
A prisoner writes to a man in whose house a church meets, about a man he is sending back to him.
“no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother”
Philemon 16Why it is hereIt never argues about slavery. It moves one word — “brother” — onto one man, in front of everybody.