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הַתְחָלָה
The Hebrew Bible in fourteen days
If you have never read the Bible, or you tried once and gave up somewhere in Leviticus, start here. Day one is eight minutes. That is the whole commitment — there are fourteen days, but nobody is asking you for fourteen days today.
Begin
Day 1: The world is made, and called good
Genesis 1 · about 8 minutes · The world, and what a person is
14 days
Before day one
It is not one book. It is a library.
Thirty nine books, written by many hands over something like a thousand years, mostly in Hebrew. Bound together they look like a novel. They are closer to a shelf.
They come in three parts, and the Hebrew name for the whole thing is made from their initials — Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim, so: Tanakh. Teaching, Prophets, Writings.
What is on the shelf is not all the same kind of thing. There is story, and law, and poetry, and furious political protest, and a love song with no religion in it at all, and one book that says everything is meaningless and then tells you to enjoy your bread. Expecting it to behave like one book, with one voice, is what defeats most people who try to read it straight through.
So you are not going to read it straight through. These fourteen days take one passage from each part of the shelf, in an order that makes a story.
The fourteen days
They run in order and they build, in five movements. Day one is the world being made; day fourteen is you deciding what to do next.
The world, and what a person is
Days 1–3Before any rule or religion, what this book says about being alive and being human.
The palm, for a chapter about things that grow.
One family is called
Days 4–5A man told to leave everything he knows — and then arguing with God about justice.
The olive branch, carried back to Noah, and the sign a promise is being kept.
Out of slavery
Days 6–8A name spoken from a bush, a night that made a people, and ten sentences said to everyone at once.
Barley, because Passover falls at the barley harvest and the first sheaf brought was barley.
How to live near other people
Days 9–11Where holiness turns out to be about wages, harvests and how you speak about your neighbour.
Wheat, because these are the chapters that tell you to leave the corners of the field unreaped.
Justice, mercy, and the bad days
Days 12–14The prophets cut it down to one line, the psalms make room for the days when it does not feel true, and you decide what happens next.
The pomegranate, carved around synagogue doors long before anyone counted its seeds.
By the end
What you will actually have
- You will have read from all three parts of the Hebrew Bible — the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings — and know what those three words mean.
- You will know the shape of the story: creation, a family, slavery, rescue, law, land, and prophets shouting about justice.
- You will have met the verses everything else quotes — the image of God, love your neighbour, the Shema, do justly and love mercy — in the chapters they actually come from.
- You will have a rhythm to carry on with, and know how to read a chapter on your own without anybody explaining it to you.
After the fourteen days
The point is not to finish. It is to end up with a rhythm you can keep. There are three here, and they work together — most people who read this way do all three at once without it taking much time at all.
About 25 minutes a week
A portion a week
The Torah is divided into fifty four pieces and read straight through, one a week, finishing and starting again each autumn. Join wherever the year is. In twelve months you will have read all five books without ever deciding what to read next.
Open
Follow the calendar
The year's own shape
The Hebrew calendar has appointed times built into it — a spring cluster about freedom, an autumn cluster about starting again. Each one has a page here: what it is, what happens, and why it might matter to you.
Open
Read anything, any time
A book at a time
Thirty nine books and nine hundred and twenty nine chapters are here to read, with nothing between you and the page. Start with a short one — Ruth, Jonah, Ecclesiastes — and go at your own pace.
Open
The seven species
The marks through this site are the seven crops Deuteronomy names as what the land grows — wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. They have decorated Jewish coins, mosaic floors and synagogue doorways for two thousand years. They are here instead of pictures of people, so that nothing on these pages asks a Jewish reader to look at something they would rather not.
- Wheat
- Barley
- Grapes
- Fig
- Pomegranate
- Olive
- Date
This week the portion is Nitzavim–Vayelech, read on Shabbat 5 September 2026.