>>24530940
>is the bible made for reading it straight through?
No, it's a collection of books, not a novel. And different churches and manuscripts historically had different book orders anyway.

I've read the whole Bible as a non-religious person and it's definitely worth it. The influence on western culture is immense, you'll pick up on a lot more references to it especially in older books. It's also fun to find out what the Bible actually says with all its weirdness, as opposed to the sanitised Sunday School version that goes Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Jesus. What I did was read all the narrative books first according to their story chronology, it's a lot more fun than slogging through all the jewish laws in Leviticus first time around (when I finally got to the laws I found them really interesting because I'd been reading up on the ancient near eastern context of them). Also, with a narrative overview, you can understand the context of the non-narrative books far better.

Here's what I'd do as a first pass-through the Bible if I started now, and then go back and read the rest according to what seems the most interesting to you:

Genesis (skip: 36)
Exodus 1-24, 32-34, 40
Numbers 9-36
Deuteronomy 34
Joshua 1-13, 22-24
Judges
Ruth
1 Samuel
2 Samuel
1 Kings
2 Kings
Jonah
Daniel 1-6
Ezra
Nehemiah
(1 Maccabees - not in Protestant Bible)
(Matthew)
(Mark)
(John)
Luke
Acts

I put Matthew, Mark, and John in brackets because if you read the four gospels back to back you'll be getting a lot of info repeated. Luke leads directly into its sequel Acts, it's the one to read if you just want a continuous narrative.

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is the bible made for reading it straight through? if not then what would be a "correct" order or an order where you confuse yourself the…