I have really been blessed by
Dr. Dan Wallace's Greek New Testament
Reading List. He was the one who introduced me to Biblical Greek at Dallas Theological Seminary.
The general idea for his reading list is that the Greek Bible (just like the English Bible!) doesn't start with the easiest book and work it's way into more complicated passages. For the new Greek student his organization was a Greek-saver. I could read passages such as John or Philemon and once I had my "sea legs" under me I could venture into more technical sections of Luke or Hebrews.
Strangely, I can't find a similar project
anywhere for the Old Testament Hebrew! "Just start reading" I kept hearing, but
surely I can do this in a way that's (at least slightly) less difficult! That being said, I present my Biblical Hebrew Reading List:
1
Deuteronomy
2
Exodus
3
1 Kings
4
2 Kings
5
Leviticus
6
Jeremiah
7
1 Samuel
8
2 Samuel
9
Zechariah
10
Haggai
11
Judges
12
Numbers
13
Jonah
14
Ruth
15
Ezekiel
16
Genesis
17
Malachi
18
Daniel
19
Ecclesiastes
20
Amos
21
Psalms
22
Joshua
23
Esther
24
Hosea
25
Micah
26
Joel
27
Zephaniah
28
Obadiah
29
Nehemiah
30
Isaiah
31
Lamentations
32
Proverbs
33
Ezra
34
Job
35
Habakkuk
36
1 Chronicles
37
2 Chronicles
38
Nahum
39
Song of Songs
It is
generally accepted that there are two ways to evaluate a passages's difficulty: lexically (vocab) and syntactically (structure). Because syntactical difficulty is hard to empirically evaluate, the above order is exclusively based on lexical rarity. It assumes that a reader is familiar with the 500 most common words (I would use
Anki if I were you; it's
free and really good) and assigns a heavier weight to rarer words. I got all my statistical data from Logos software, based upon Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text and manipulated in Excel.
As the below chart shows, there can be a big difference in the number of words a reader would likely be unfamiliar with. If you start with Song of Songs you will likely be 4x as frustrated as if you start with 2 Chronicles!
The one other edit to the above list that I made was to combine books that are obviously related such as 1 & 2 Kings. If you want the spreadsheets, comment below and I can send them to you directly.