Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies. And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

And I don't have a, when we get started, because we're starting over.

We're beginning at the beginning, which is a very good place to start.

We're so Rogers and Hammerstein would have us believe.

So most of tonight, as I mentioned, is probably going to be introduction.

I'm not, as I mentioned, going to do introduction to the Bible as such, because there's

a recently published book about that that people can pick up if they want that.

I am, however, we're going to do sort of an introduction to the Torah as a whole, and then an

introduction to the book of Genesis, and that's why I'm imagining that's going to take up most of

tonight to kind of set the stage.

And then presumably, Lord willing, next week will actually start with Genesis 1, verse 1 and go from there.

So, as I said, we'll begin with an introduction to the Torah as a whole.

The Torah is the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus,

Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

That is, and has, as far as we can tell, as far as we have evidence, always circulated as a unit.

As we go on tonight, we'll talk a little more about that, but as a unit of five books,

often contained on one big scroll, sometimes on five individual scrolls.

And that unit is the first basic building block of the whole concept of scriptures.

So that's the beginning. And when the other books of the Hebrew Bible, Christian Old Testament,

when those are called scriptures, they're being called scriptures in connection with the Torah.

...