1. Read a whole book (or, if impractical, a large, cohesive section) of the Bible aloud in a group.
2. Pray for illumination (Cranmer’s famous Collect for Scripture is good here.)
3. Sit silently together for 5 minutes. No distractions allowed!
4. Discuss any questions and observations that occur to you, taking notes. Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.
5. Look for, and name, patterns that emerge in the questions and observations.
6. Reconvene and repeat, rereading the notes from last time.

That’s all it takes to have a great Bible study. You don’t need a scholarly guide or a commercially produced book study. You don’t need knowledge of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible, though those are occasionally useful bonuses to be deployed with tremendous care and caution. You certainly don’t need pre-written questions, whether from a celebrity Christian author or ChatGPT (perish the thought). What you really need is time and space for contemplation. There are no Bible study “tools” that can substitute for that now-threatened resource. The Word of God is living and active, and the modern technological world represents a colossal project of seeking to drown out its voice. Silence the noises, and listen to the Spirit.

Actually, there is one “tool” you do need, and should incorporate into the discussion process after you’ve read the book or section under consideration a few times together. That tool is the rest of the Bible. The whole canon of Scripture is your indispensable guide to understanding each part. Many modern Bibles include a cross-reference system; some of these references are more valuable than others, but figure out which ones are the most fruitful, and read those passages (with their full contexts!) aloud too. Commentaries, too, are useful in this context, because they can point out theological parallels and connections that are too macro-scale to fit into the cross-reference system. But most of all, use your own intuitions developed through reading the Bible: “this bit here sounds awfully like…” is the right instinct to follow. Commentaries and cross-references are really only useful insofar as they build up your own biblical literacy and instincts. Let the different parts of the canon speak to and about one another.

And, incidentally, as you do this, don’t worry overmuch about historical questions of whether or not “the writer of Book X knew and was referencing Book Y.” For modern people, these kinds of questions are red herrings that lead us astray from the actual task of understanding the words in the canon. Of course the words emerge from a historical setting. They are still in our Bibles because generations of the faithful following God’s Way realized that these words transcended (without obviating) the particularities of their original historical settings and were speaking to them, with divine import and power, in the divine Now: “as long as it is called ‘Today.'” Rather settle for trusting a) the intentionality of the canon’s later editors and compilers, who definitely knew what they were doing, and b) the divine intentionality of the Spirit of God in guiding the authors, editors, and compilers through that process.