Have you ever wondered why some books are in the Bible and some are not? Or maybe you’ve noticed that different sects of Christianity have different biblical canons, and you want to know which canon is the “correct” one. Perhaps you want to know if the books of the Apocrypha are to be accounted as part of the sacred canon of Scripture. The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox say that it is Scripture, the Protestants say it isn’t. Who is to say that Luther & Tyndale didn’t get it wrong? And what about the book of Enoch? Jude quoted it–doesn’t that mean that the book of Enoch should be part of the canon?
These are all valid and important questions. If the Creator of the Universe gave us a body of sacred writings that reveals who he is and tells us what he requires of us–it’s important to make sure that we have the correct book! Fortunately, the Lord in his perfect foreknowledge knew that post-modern Christians would ask such questions, and he therefore left not himself without witness, and took it upon himself to place an internal measuring line within the Bible which bears witness to the final form of the divinely sanctioned biblical canon. This proverbial measuring line I am referring to is known as the Canonical Column.
What is the Canonical Column?
The Canonical Column is the name I have given to a divinely encoded structural framework and prophetic network embedded within Scripture, bearing witness to the final form of the divinely sanctioned biblical canon by identifying all sixty-six books and testifying of their precise ordinal placement within the canonical sequence.1 It is the measuring reed God has given us which allows us to determine objectively which books are part of Scripture and which are not. What is more, it reveals which biblical canon is the divinely sanctioned one which blooms blossoms and yields almonds (Num 17:8), thereby identifying all others as unsanctioned and destitute of divine authority.
Fashioned in the likeness of the menorah (Exod. 25:31–40; cf. Zech. 4:1–14), the Canonical Column consists of six branches (sections), arranged as three pairs of complementary sections. All six branches of the framework are unified by the central shaft—Jesus Christ, the Spirit of prophecy—who stands as the centerpiece of their collective testimony, filling the entire framework with meaning and giving it life. The three pairs of branches are: The Circumcision (Genesis 12–50) and An Holy Priesthood (Leviticus); First Isaiah (Isaiah 1–39) and Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66); and the Old Testament and New Testament.
The Organizational Structure of the Canonical Column
As previously stated, the Canonical Column is intricately tied to the menorah, which as I have explained in a previous post on this blog is a symbolic prefiguring or type of the Holy Bible as specifically exemplified in the Protestant biblical canon. The Canonical Column’s structural design is thus intricately tied to the design of the menorah. It consists of six individual branches which operate as three pairs. The three pairs of branches adhere to the very same meticulous numbering system which is inherent to the menorah’s design.
As previously stated, the Canonical Column’s three pairs of branches are as follows:
- Branch 1: The Circumcision (Genesis 12-50)
- Branch 4: An Holy Priesthood (Leviticus)
- Branch 2: First Isaiah (Isaiah 1-39)
- Branch 5: Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-66)
- Branch 3: Old Testament
- Branch 6: New Testament
For maximum clarity, I have created the table below to help make it easier to visualize these identifications. Note that the “tier/class” column is just a convenient classification system that I devised to help make contextualizing and differentiating the three pairs easier. Thus branches 1 & 4 are what I term the “Law” branch-pair, so called because both branches are contained within the Law of Moses. Similarly, branches 2 & 5 constitute what I refer to as the “Prophets” branch-pair, as both of these branches are found within the book of Isaiah–which is the first book of the Prophets section of the canon. Lastly, branches 3 & 6 comprise what I refer to as the “Word” branch-pair, as these two branches are the Old and New Testaments themselves.
| Pair of Branches | Tier/Class | Identification |
| 1 & 4 | “The Law” | The Circumcision (1) & An Holy Priesthood (4) |
| 2 & 5 | “The Prophets” | First Isaiah (2) & Second Isaiah (5) |
| 3 & 6 | “The Word” | Old Testament (3) & New Testament (6) |
As indicated in the earlier image of the Canonical Column with its branches labeled, the two innermost branches (branches 3 and 6) of the Canonical Column signify the Old and New Testaments, and therefore this pair represents the Holy Bible itself. I refer to these as the inner branches of the framework, or the “Word” branch-pair. These are the most important branches, for they are the ones to which the other four ultimately bear witness.
The middle and outer pairs of branches are what I refer to as the scaffolding branches (or witnessing branches), of the framework. Each of these pairs—The Circumcision with An Holy Priesthood (branches 1 and 4, the “Law” branch-pair) and First Isaiah with Second Isaiah (branches 2 and 5, the “Prophets” branch-pair)—contains a total of sixty-six chapters, arranged as thirty-nine chapters in the former branch and twenty-seven chapters in the latter (see image below). In this way, each of these scaffolding pairs functions as a complete figurative model of the Protestant biblical canon, distinguished by its sixty-six-book total and its 39–27 division between the Old and New Testaments.
Because of this structure, each individual scaffolding branch serves as a figurative type of the testament toward which its lamp is oriented. The Circumcision and First Isaiah, with their thirty-nine chapters apiece, function as figurative types of the Old Testament canon. Likewise, An Holy Priesthood and Second Isaiah, with their twenty-seven chapters, function as figurative types of the New Testament canon. But it does not end with the fact that the middle and outer pairs mirror the Bible’s 39–27 division. Nay, the rabbit hole goes far, far deeper than that.
Beyond functioning as large-scale types of the Old and New Testaments, the individual chapters within these branches have been deliberately designed to function as microcosmic figurative types of the exact biblical book that occupies the same numerical position in the canonical sequence as they do within the 39- or 27-chapter structure of their respective branch. To this end, each chapter in the middle and outer pairs has been intentionally infused by God with textual allusions to the specific passages, scenes, imagery, and content that, in his perfect foreknowledge, he knew would be contained within their corresponding biblical books. For this reason, I refer to the 132 chapters in these four branches as witnessing chapters.
How the Canonical Column works
Every book of the Bible has two witnessing chapters that correspond to it within the Canonical Column—one from the “Law” pair of scaffolding branches (The Circumcision & An Holy Priesthood) and one from the “Prophets” pair of scaffolding branches (First Isaiah & Second Isaiah). As previously stated, each witnessing chapter has been meticulously imbued with structural echoes and creative allusions to specific content within the biblical book that it corresponds to within its witnessed testament. By this means it bears witness to that book and to its precise ordinal placement within both its testament and the larger canon.
To illustrate how this works in practice: Genesis 37 is the twenty-sixth chapter of The Circumcision, while Isaiah 26 is the twenty-sixth chapter of First Isaiah. Both chapters have been deliberately embedded with structural echoes and textual allusions to specific passages and imagery found in the book of Ezekiel. By this means, each independently bears witness to Ezekiel as the twenty-sixth book of the Old Testament and of the biblical canon as a whole.
Likewise, Leviticus 21 is the twenty-first chapter of An Holy Priesthood (and the sixtieth chapter of the Law pair collectively), while Isaiah 60 is the twenty-first chapter of Second Isaiah (and the sixtieth chapter of the Prophets pair collectively). Both chapters therefore contain deliberate allusions and structural parallels to the epistle of 1 Peter, by which they affirm its canonicity and its ordained position as the twenty-first book of the New Testament and the sixtieth book of the biblical canon.
The result is that the canonicity and ordinal position of every book of the Bible is established by two independent witnesses (Matt. 18:16; 2 Cor. 13:1; cf. Deut. 19:15). Each witnessing chapter operates as a prophetic mirror—its position, content, and internal imagery intentionally echoing its corresponding book of the canon, thereby confirming both its inclusion in Scripture and its divinely ordained position within the biblical canon.
To minimize confusion, the following table reveals what sections of the Bible the four scaffolding branches of the Canonical Column encompass.
| Branch # | Branch-pair | Name of branch | Biblical section | Number of chapters | Foreshadows |
| 1 | The Law | The Circumcision | Genesis 12-50 | 39 | The Old Testament |
| 4 | The Law | An Holy Priesthood | Leviticus | 27 | The New Testament |
| 2 | The Prophets | First Isaiah | Isaiah 1-39 | 39 | The Old Testament |
| 5 | The Prophets | Second Isaiah | Isaiah 40-66 | 27 | The New Testament |
Thus, what we are essentially dealing with with regards to the Canonical Column is a framework which contains not one, but two detailed figurative models or blueprints of the complete Holy Bible–both testifying not only of the precise number of books in the canon and its 39-27 book sectional division, but both even identifying all 66 books of the Bible and affirming their precise ordinal positions within the canon! The Canonical Column therefore furnishes two independent measuring lines which may be set alongside the canon itself, enabling us to test whether the canon lines up with the Column’s prophetic witness, in accordance with the biblical standard that “in the mouth of two witnesses every word shall be established.”
The Significance of the Canonical Column and why it’s Miraculous
What makes the Canonical Column so astonishing is that its very existence should not even be possible.
First, consider the origin of the Scriptures themselves. The Bible was written by roughly forty different men, across three languages, in multiple regions of the ancient Near East, over a span of more than 1,500 years. These men were not collaborating. Many of them live hundreds of years apart and most of them never met. And yet, the Canonical Column reveals a system of deep structural symmetry, numerical alignment, and intertextual correspondence running through their writings—something they could never have orchestrated on their own.
Second, the entire framework of the Canonical Column depends on the system of chapter divisions that did not exist until the 13th century, when Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, introduced the chapter scheme we use today. These divisions were created more than a millennium after the last book of Scripture was written. And yet, when the chapter structure was finally applied, it produced two complete sets of witnessing chapters in Genesis, Leviticus, and Isaiah—slicing and arranging them in a way that caused each witnessing chapter to contain unmistakable textual allusions to the biblical book that would one day occupy the same numerical position in the canonical sequence. Once this system was devised and inserted into the Bible around 1220 AD, the prophetic witness of the Canonical Column was now in place. Unbeknownst to Langton, he had just unknowingly completed the Canonical Column’s two pairs of scaffolding branches–creating an intricate self-authenticating prophetic network of witnessing chapters which testified of the complete biblical canon which was still to come.
The fact that the Canonical Column’s scaffolding branches were established and in place over three centuries before the canon they testified of existed is crucial. This proves that it is impossible that Langton himself could have engineered such a design, as the sixty-six-book Protestant canon that the Canonical Column bears witness to did not exist in his day. That canon would not be brought into existence in its final, fully aligned form on the earth until the Geneva Bible was published in 1560–which was the first Bible to contain all 66 books sequenced exactly as they are in Protestant Bibles today.2 Langton had neither access to nor awareness of this future canon. He could not have structured his chapter scheme to align with something he did not know.
When you put all of this together, the implications are difficult to ignore. The biblical authors could not have coordinated such a structure; they lived in different eras and had no knowledge of a future canon shaped around thirty-nine Old Testament books and twenty-seven New Testament books. The chapter divisions that the Canonical Column depends on did not appear until the early 13th century, and their creator had no concept of a future Protestant canon—for the canon of his day contained seventy-three books, with the Apocrypha integrated directly into the Old Testament sequence, placing it entirely out of alignment with the divinely sanctioned canon witnessed by the Canonical Column. That sixty-six-book canon we now recognize was not finalized until the 1500s—long after both the chapter system and the biblical texts themselves were complete.
Thus the Canonical Column’s prophetic witness preceded the canon it foretold by over three centuries. And the precision of that prophetic witness proves that only God could have done it. The framework foretold not only that there would be exactly sixty-six books in the canon divided into two testaments of thirty-nine and twenty-seven (which would have been impressive enough), but it even went so far as to identify all sixty-six of those books and to list the exact order in which they would appear within the canonical sequence. It accurately predicted what the final form of the Bible would look like down to the tiniest detail—over three centuries before that book even existed! The Canonical Column thus proves that the Bible is not a work of man. It was divinely written, assembled, purified, arranged, and formatted—and its final form had already been determined from of old.
God deliberately used many hands across many centuries to craft a structural framework and prophetic network that no single human being could ever have engineered. He did this so that no one would be able to argue that it was a work of man. Only God could have done it–and he did.
Purpose of this series
This introduction provides only a simple overview of the Canonical Column.
The posts that follow will examine each biblical book individually and demonstrate how its two witnessing chapters—one from the Law and one from the Prophets—have been divinely embedded with structural and textual allusions of various kinds to the content of that book.
As we are about to see, the testimony of Jesus Christ is self-authenticating–bearing witness to its own divine authorship and compilation. The Canonical Column reveals the Bible to be a light which–quite literally–bears witness of itself (John 8:12-18; Num. 8:2-4), and testifies of its own divine origin.
- The mystery of the Canonical Column was divinely revealed to me way back in 2009, although I didn’t name it “the Canonical Column” until 2011. ↩︎
- Although there had been multiple editions of the Protestant Bible which contained 66 books and the 39-27 sectional division prior to this, the Geneva Bible of 1560 was the first to contain all 66 books sequenced exactly as they are in today’s Protestant Bibles. For example, the Luther Bible of 1534 declared the Apocryphal books to not be Scripture and removed them from the Old Testament sequencing, but Luther questioned the divine inspiration of certain NT books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation) and appended them to the back of the Bible. This placed several books of the NT out of alignment with the prophetic witness of the Canonical Column. This placed several books of the NT out of alignment with the prophetic witness of the Canonical Column, which requires not only the correct 66 books, but also the correct ordinal placement of all 66 books. ↩︎
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