Creating Custom Bible Reading Scopes with Zoe Psomí

Introduction

There are several ways to read the Bible, the main one possibly being reading all the books of the Bible in their entirety, from Genesis to Revelation.

However, depending on the situation, the reader may at some point be interested in reading only a specific part of the Bible, or a specific set of books from the Old or New Testament that they want to learn more about, without necessarily reading the entire Bible.

The Bible Reading app gives you the flexibility to create Bible readings that include any combination of books of the Bible that you desire. This is the topic that we will discuss in this article.

Bible Reading Scope

The scope of a Bible reading is the set of books that are part of your Bible reading.

A Bible reading can have a full scope, comprising all the books of the Old and New Testaments, or it can also have a partial scope, comprising only some of the books of the Bible.

Some examples of Bible readings with a partial scope are:

• Readings in which you want to read only the Old Testament without reading the New Testament, or vice versa.
• Readings in which you want to read specific parts of the Bible, such as the five books of the Pentateuch, or the four books of the Gospels, or even a combination of different parts of the Bible.
• Readings in which you want to read a set of specific books of the Old and/or New Testament, while at the same time removing the other books from the scope or from the focus of the Bible reading that you are planning to do or already doing at the moment.

In this sense, the scope of a Bible reading can also be interpreted as the focus of your Bible reading, that is, the set of books of the Bible on which you want to focus your attention during your reading. Of course, this does not mean that you will never read the other parts of the Bible that are not included in the scope of your reading, but rather that you will leave the reading of those books for another time or opportunity.

You can also use different Bible reading scopes as a way to organize and carry out your Bible readings simultaneously. Through the Bible Reading app, you can create two or more readings, each one covering a different set (scope) of books of the Bible, thus allowing you to divide the complete reading of the Bible into different partial, smaller and complementary Bible readings.

The scope of your Bible readings can be defined in the Bible Reading app in three different situations:

• when registering a new Bible reading;
• after your Bible reading has already been registered and is currently active;
• after your Bible reading has been scheduled to start on a future date, and this scheduled reading has not yet started.

The following sections describe how to define the scope of your Bible readings in each of these situations.

Setting Up The Scope of New Bible Readings

The first opportunity you have to define the scope of a Bible reading is when registering this new reading.

As shown in the image above, defining the reading scope is the first step in the new Bible reading registration screen.

By default, the Bible Reading app assumes that you want to create a full-scope Bible reading, and therefore pre-selects all the books of the Old and New Testaments. To change the scope of your reading, simply expand the nodes of the reading scope tree and select or deselect the books that you want or do not want to include in the scope of your reading, respectively.

For example, in the image below we see a situation in which a user of the Bible Reading app removed all the books of the Pentateuch from the scope of their reading and also removed the book of Job. This results in the definition of a partial scope of the Bible reading, covering the vast majority of the books of the Old Testament and also all the books of the New Testament.

In this new image we see another example of partial scope of Bible reading, in which the user decided to read only some books of the New Testament and removed all the books of the Old Testament from the reading scope.

By combining and selecting the books of the Bible, you can define any scope you desire for your Bible readings, whether it be a complete scope or a partial scope.

Changing the Scope of Future Bible Readings

If you have created a Bible reading with a future start date, you can change the scope of that reading while it has not yet started.

To change the scope of a Bible reading scheduled for a future date, follow these steps:

1. Select your Bible reading scheduled for a future date on the reading list screen.

   

2. On the “Scheduled/Future Reading” screen, select the “Modify future reading schedule…” option.
3. On the “Edit Reading” screen, modify the scope of your reading by checking or unchecking the books you wish to include or remove from your reading, then press the “Next” button, and then proceed to the last step to save your changes. Note that this screen is nearly identical to the screen for registering a new Bible reading, and that the process for changing/defining the scope of your reading is exactly the same as that described for the new reading registration screen.
   

Changing the Scope of Active Bible Readings

The process of changing the scope of an active Bible reading is similar to the process of defining the scope of a new Bible reading, but it is slightly different because it involves potential loss of information that may occur if you remove, from the scope of your Bible reading, books that you have already started or finished reading in the selected active Bible reading.

The Bible Reading app will alert you about this and other possible impacts of changing the scope of existing active Bible readings. Pay close attention to the yellow and especially red messages displayed by the app before confirming whether you really want to change the scope of your Bible reading.

With this in mind, as we said, changing the scope of an active Bible reading is quite similar to the process of defining the scope of a new Bible reading, and can be done as follows:

1. Select your active Bible reading from the reading list screen.
2. On the selected active Bible reading control screen, select the settings tab () and then press the “Reading Scope” card.
   
3. On the “Reading Scope” screen, add or remove the books that you want to be included or not included in the scope of your Bible reading.
   
4. If the Bible Reading application displays yellow warning messages or red error messages, pay close attention to the observations presented, resolve the errors and try again.
5. Press the “Save” button in the top right corner of the screen and confirm your changes.