Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the Bible can mostly be distilled to Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels without losing too much. Each of those books is eminently legible in its own right. You could arguably make the sermon on the mount its own book, “communist manifesto” style. I think those individual chapters would be super compelling to modern readers with or without a religious background, but their legibility is held back by the rest of t…
It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate c…
However, I do think the abrahamic origin stories (genesis), the tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt and reception of the Ten Commandments (exodus), and the moral teachings of Christ that replace those commandments (gospels) are more or less self-contained and free-standing, if you’re trying to understand them at face value.
The gospels in particular contain a good moral teachings that are arguably more valuable than anything else in the book. Like really clear directives on how to live and carry yourself.
In my Weird Bible, I’d cold open with the sermon on the mount, followed by the Pharisees and the passion, and recursively hyper-link to every New Testament or Old Testament thing that supports those “primary” stories. I feel like if you arranged the Bible into a neat “tree” structure that way, the main load-bearing trunks would be the books mentioned.