Six of My 2025 Reads: Hear Ye the Word of the Lord: What We Miss if We Only Read the Bible by D. Brent Sandy

At the top of 1997 I sat down and listed all the books I’d read up to that point. I came up with ~40 titles. I’m sure this was not all of them, but it was a fair start. Beginning that same year I began to keep a list of the books I’d read each year.

As we near the end of 2025, I’m highlighting six of this year’s reads—a book of poetry, two novels, and three non-fiction titles. Perhaps you’ll find one you wish to add to your 2026 reading stack.

Hear Ye the Word of the Lord by D. Brent Sandy

Most of us individually consume the Bible by reading it, usually alone and silently to ourselves. Sometimes we read it aloud to others. With these practices, we forget the majority of the biblical texts were intended as oratory first and were only later codified in writing. Even the letters written by Paul were passed around and read aloud before being memorialized as texts. Sitting alone, silently reading scripture is a relatively new development.

Hear Ye the Word of the Lord reminds us of this historical and cultural fact, and demonstrates that by keeping this in mind, and more frequently reading scripture aloud, the text comes alive in ways it wouldn’t otherwise. We have few reference points for a culture in which a text is primarily delivered and received orally, and the biblical text has auditory qualities which we’ve muted over millennia of handling it in written form.

Dr. Sandy reviews these facts, discusses how divine truth was spoken through men, urges we recapture a hearer’s mindset, and promotes reception of the scriptures as an orally delivered text with openness to the imagination this triggers. In doing so he surfaces a key aspect of biblical literacy I’ve not seen elsewhere. Indeed, it seems we miss a great deal when we only read the Bible.  

Leave a comment with what you’ve been reading this year!