The Old Testament as seventeen marks — Margot Butler’s story line, measured

Margot J. Butler prepared this for the CES Teaching Fair on the Old Testament at Brigham Young University, 13–15 August 1991; Richard DeLand drew the pictorial version. It compresses roughly two thousand years and thirty-nine books into a single unbroken stroke-line that a student can reproduce on a board from memory. This page takes the compression apart: what each mark carries, what the spacing does and does not encode, and what the shape of the line turns out to be.

Butler’s own account of the method. “Richard DeLand’s artistic version makes an attractive chart to enlarge and put up permanently on the wall. The place of any new character or event can be pointed out on the story line even though the person is not on it. I draw my less artistic version on the board for timed competition.”
17marks in the line
39books they carry
1950years spanned
450years in the widest single step
10years in the narrowest
6turns of one cycle
What is being claimed here, and what is not. The dates are the traditional ones this teaching tradition uses, and several are genuinely disputed — the Exodus above all, where an early date near 1450 BC and a late date near 1250 BC both have serious defenders. Where a figure is contested it is marked. Nothing on this page argues for a chronology; it measures what Butler’s chart does given the chronology she is teaching.

1 · The board as she actually draws it

Reconstructed from frames of the talk rather than from the printed handout. The line is a boustrophedon — three rows that alternate direction — and the reversal is not a page-break convenience. The forty years of wandering are the return sweep: the line loses a whole row of progress before it can resume. She draws the events in black in one pass, then goes back over the finished line in red and cuts it into book spans.

The board as drawn — three rows, alternating direction, two passes Black: the events, first pass. Red: the books, laid over afterwards as boundaries that cut the line into spans. 40 the line reverses — forty years spent going back the way it came S D S UK J I 10 19/ 0 A 721 ? the ten tribes — the one thread left unresolved J R 2 20/ 8 B C D J ZEN 400 G E L N D J J I & II I K II K E N (E) Esther sits in parentheses under Cyrus and Darius — in the canon and in the period, but off the thread. She stayed in Persia. Reconstructed from frames of the talk, not from the printed handout. Proportions follow the board; the hand does not. Frames: video_frames/ot-storyline/.
Books are spans, not marks. The second pass draws vertical red boundaries across the line and labels the intervals between them. Genesis alone covers five marks — creation, flood, Babel, the patriarchs, the descent into Egypt. Leviticus is not a boundary at all but a letter written below the line at Sinai, because it is a handbook attached to one moment rather than a stretch of narrative. And 1 Kings opens over Solomon’s crown, before the division, with its boundary dropping vertically through the fork — the one place the overlay admits the line has split in two and one book is covering both branches.
What this corrects. An earlier version of this page rendered the story line as a single straight equally spaced stroke and measured it against chronology on that basis. The measurement in section 2 still holds — the marks really do sit where it says relative to the dates — but it was measuring a shape that is not on the board. The real artifact is two-pass, two-colour, and reverses direction, and the layout is carrying argument: captivity is a box you are inside (bars for Egypt, the star for Babylon — one glyph reused eight hundred years apart), delay is the line going backwards, and the ten tribes are a thread that leaves the board.

1 · The line itself

Seventeen marks, left to right, drawn at the proportions Butler uses. Colour carries the structural role of each mark rather than its subject — gold for covenant, red for judgment and captivity, green for deliverance and return, violet for the one glyph that is itself a cycle.

The story line — seventeen marks, equal spacing, as drawn on the board 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 books begin G E L N D J J R 1S 2S 1C 1K 2K 2C Colour: gold covenant · red judgment or captivity · green deliverance or return · violet the judges cycle · blue the close
1 · origin
The creative period
2 · judgment
The Flood
3 · dispersion
The Tower of Babel
4 · covenant
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob
5 · captivity
Joseph in captivity; later the Israelites in bondage
6 · deliverance
Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt
7 · covenant
They camp at Mt Sinai and receive the Ten Commandments
8 · wandering · 40 yrs
They wander in the wilderness and end up in Moab
9 · deliverance
Joshua leads them across the Jordan into the promised land
10 · possession
Joshua takes Jericho and other cities
11 · cycle · 325 yrs
The period of the judges
12 · golden-age · 120 yrs
Israel unites into a kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon
13 · schism
The kingdom divides
14 · captivity
Assyria captures the Kingdom of Israel. They are the lost ten tribes.
15 · captivity · 70 yrs
The Kingdom of Judah is taken into captivity by Babylon
16 · return
Zerubbabel, Ezra, Nehemiah
17 · close · 400 yrs
The Old Testament story finishes about 400 B.C.

2 · What the spacing encodes — and what it does not

The line is drawn at equal intervals. Below, each mark is dropped onto a true linear axis in years, and the two are joined. The joining lines are the distortion. This is the one place the chart can be checked rather than admired.

Equal spacing above, true chronology below as drawn to scale 2200 BC 2000 BC 1800 BC 1600 BC 1400 BC 1200 BC 1000 BC 800 BC 600 BC 400 BC 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 widest step — 450 years between marks 5 and 6, drawn the same width as every other narrowest — 2 step(s) of zero years, drawn exactly as wide
The chart is fair at the large scale and wild at the small one, which is the opposite of what you would guess. Split the dated marks in half and the first eight carry 950 years while the last eight carry 1000 — within five per cent of each other. Butler’s intuitive spacing is, globally, almost to scale. But step to step the gaps run from zero years to 450, every one of them drawn at identical width. Two pairs of marks sit at the same traditional date — Sinai with the Exodus, Jericho with the Jordan crossing — and get the same space as the 450-year silence between Joseph and Moses. The mean gap is 130 years, the median 100. So the line is not a timeline with errors in it. It is a sequence diagram whose macro-proportions happen to come out honest.

3 · The shape: one wheel, six turns

Read for structure rather than content, the line stops being a list. The same figure recurs — covenant, possession, falling away, judgment or captivity, then deliverance — six times, each turn larger than the last. This is the Deuteronomistic cycle, and Butler has drawn it as a waveform without ever naming it.

The same figure, six times, at increasing scale creation flood turn 1 patriarchs bondage in Egypt turn 2 Sinai wilderness 40 turn 3 possession of the land judges cycle turn 4 united kingdom division, then Assyria a turn 5 second temple 400 years of silence turn 6 the sixth turn has no deliverance drawn
The chart ends mid-turn, and that is deliberate. Five times the figure completes: bondage gives way to exodus, wandering to the Jordan, the judges to the kingdom, the exile to the return. The sixth turn puts the second temple at the top and four hundred years of silence at the bottom — and then stops, on a double bar. That reading is not an inference: the presenter says it outright — “these double lines mean end of the piece in music” — and it is drawn as the one thing on the chart that is unfinished. For the tradition that produced this handout, the resolution of that sixth turn is the New Testament. The chart is shaped to leave the door open.

4 · Two axes at once — the prophets

Butler’s second worksheet does something the story line does not: it drops chronology almost entirely and arranges the prophets by who they spoke to, positioned roughly as those audiences sit on a map. Time re-enters only as a single relation — before, during, or after the captivity. Audience in space, position relative to one event in time.

The prophets, by audience and by the captivity Assyria Jonah Nahum Israel Hosea Amos Judah Habakkuk Isaiah Joel Jeremiah/Lamentations Micah Zephaniah Edom Obadiah during the captivity Daniel Ezekiel after the return Haggai Zechariah Malachi Nehemiah-era Positions are schematic, following Butler’s “spaced sort of geographically”. Prophets before the captivity are listed alphabetically, as on her sheet.

5 · The arithmetic she hides in the words

Three numeric devices carry more of the teaching load than the drawing does.

39 and 27

OLD has three letters, TESTAMENT has nine: set them side by side and read 39. The New Testament uses the same two digits and a different operation — 3 × 9 = 27. One pair of digits, concatenated for one testament and multiplied for the other. The mnemonic is orthographic on one side of the Bible and arithmetic on the other.

17 · 5 · 17

Seventeen historic books, five poetic, seventeen prophetic. Each seventeen splits the same way — five and twelve. Five books of Moses and twelve of history; five major prophets and the Book of the Twelve. The whole canon is laid out symmetrically around the poetic books, and the number five appears three times.

A B C D

The four imperial powers arrive in alphabetical order — Assyria, Babylon, Cyrus, Darius — and the talk points it out: “notice how easy this is … a b c d very helpful”. This one is spoken only; it is not on the handout. Three mnemonics in twelve minutes, and each uses a different mechanism: orthographic for 39, arithmetic for 27, alphabetic here.

19/0 and 20/8

Israel had nineteen kings and none were righteous. Judah had twenty and eight tried to be. Written as fractions on the chart, these are the only place the drawing renders a moral judgment as a number: 0.00 against 0.40. It is also the chart’s explanation for why one branch ends in a question mark and the other continues.

BranchTribesKingsRighteousRatioEnds
Israel (north)101900.00captured by Assyria in 722 BC — the lost ten tribes, drawn as an arrow into a question mark
Judah (south)22080.40taken by Babylon in 586 BC, returns after seventy years, continues to the close

6 · Why this belongs in the Old World corpus

Not because of its subject. Because of its shape.

The seventeen marks are inherited, not chosen. This page originally treated the three seventeens — marks on the line, historic books, prophetic books — as a noticed symmetry. The transcript, ingested on 2026-09-04, shows it is a stated mechanism: “those who compiled the old testament did it in a pretty much chronological order for the first 17 books and so this timeline follows the order of the first 17 books in the old testament”. The line tracks the historical books, one mark per book, which is why the count matches. That makes the chart a finding aid as much as a timeline: a mark’s position tells you which book to open, not only where the event sits in sequence. It also resolves the tension in section 2 — the spacing is not trying to encode elapsed time and failing, it is encoding book order and succeeding.
The story line is a compression scheme for a repeating narrative, and the corpus is full of the same scheme with different nouns. Strip the proper names from Butler’s six turns and what remains is: an ordered world, a catastrophe that resets it, a scattering, a period of bondage under a foreign power, a deliverance, a covenant or golden age, a falling away, an erasure by an empire, a remnant that returns, and a long silence before the record resumes. That is also, almost line for line, the narrative spine of the Tartaria material already in this collection — the reset, the mud flood, the buried cities, the erasure from the record, the surviving remnant, the archive that was destroyed, and the interval before anyone was allowed to speak of it again. The two bodies of material make entirely different truth claims. They are built on the same story shape, and the shape is old.
What that gives you analytically. A shape you can look for. If a narrative arrives already fitted to this figure, that tells you something about how it was assembled — not that it is false, but that its structure was available in advance and did not have to be discovered in the evidence. Butler’s chart is useful here precisely because it is honest about being a teaching device: it shows the figure cleanly, with nothing at stake in disguising it.

7 · The symbol set as data

All seventeen marks are held in ot_storyline.json — each with its SVG path, the books it carries, its structural phase, its motif, its traditional date and whether that date is disputed. The drawing above is generated from that file, so the diagram and the data cannot drift apart.

#MarkPhaseMotifDateBooks it carries
1The creative periodoriginunity—Genesis
2The Floodjudgmentwater-reset2350 BC ⚠Genesis
3The Tower of Babeldispersionscattering2250 BC ⚠Genesis
4Abraham, Isaac, Jacobcovenantpromise2000 BCGenesis
5Joseph in captivity; later the Israelites in bondagecaptivitybondage1900 BCGenesis, Exodus
6Moses leads the Israelites out of Egyptdeliverancewater-crossing1450 BC ⚠Exodus
7They camp at Mt Sinai and receive the Ten Commandmentscovenantlaw-given1450 BCExodus, Leviticus, Numbers
8They wander in the wilderness and end up in Moabwanderingdelay1410 BCNumbers, Deuteronomy
9Joshua leads them across the Jordan into the promised landdeliverancewater-crossing1400 BCJoshua
10Joshua takes Jericho and other citiespossessionconquest1400 BCJoshua
11The period of the judgescycleapostasy-loop1375 BCJudges, Ruth, 1 Samuel
12Israel unites into a kingdom under Saul, David and Solomongolden-ageunity1050 BC1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles
13The kingdom dividesschismscattering930 BC1 Kings
14Assyria captures the Kingdom of Israel. They are the lost ten tribes.captivityerasure722 BC ⚠2 Kings
15The Kingdom of Judah is taken into captivity by Babyloncaptivitybondage586 BC2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezekiel, Daniel
16Zerubbabel, Ezra, Nehemiahreturnrebuilding538 BCEzra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah
17The Old Testament story finishes about 400 B.C.closerest400 BCMalachi
Primary source: Old Testament Story Line, Margot J. Butler, prepared for the CES Teaching Fair on the Old Testament, 13–15 August 1991, Brigham Young University; pictorial register by Richard DeLand. Archived by permission by Book of Mormon Central / Scripture Central. Presented in An Easy Way to Visualize & Understand the Old Testament.
Every figure on this page is computed at build time from ot_storyline.json: 17 marks, 16 of them dated, spanning 2350–400 BC; step gaps from 10 to 450 years, mean 130, median 100; first half 950 years against last half 1000.
Dates are the traditional ones used in this teaching tradition and several are disputed — the Exodus most of all, where early (~1450 BC) and late (~1250 BC) datings both have serious support. Marked ⚠ in the table above. No chronology is argued for here.
Generated by gen_ot_storyline.py for the old-world project.