Harold Bloom once said that any person who read the Bible from cover to cover would have to be a madman or a fool; it's just not meant to be read that way. Well, I've done it twice!
The first time was in 2009. I had just gotten a score on my GRE 2 Literature in English exam that was not as high as I'd hoped, and tackling the Bible was one part of a more massive project to fill in the gaps. (The plan worked. Two years later I got an impeccable score.) For my first attempt, I chose the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha and I read it exhaustively--every introduction, every explanatory footnote, every concordance note, every appendix. In hindsight, this was a pretty awful plan for achieving what I was looking for. Strictly from a literary standpoint, I should've chosen a King James Version; that's what would've helped me to best recognize allusions and quotations in other works. The New Revised Standard Version gave a more literal and historically contextualized version, which helped me to better understand what was being said but also oriented my mind toward literalness and paranoid particularity. In 2009, my agnosticism skewed quite heavily towards atheism, and with all the footnotes and editors' introductions of the Oxford edition, I became rather preoccupied with the finer points of undermining what I was reading. The question of whether every word of the Bible is literally true is a debate with a surprisingly brief and stupid history, and it's a question that essentially misses the point altogether; of course there are inconsistencies, mistakes, contradictions, and impossibilities scattered throughout the Bible, but that doesn't mean its words can't still be the centerpiece of an intelligent person's religion.
The Oxford Annotated Version did give me an appreciation for isolated works like Ecclesiastes and Job, but it also ultimately left me with an overall frustration and confusion. I couldn't fit together how all the prophets and exiles and temple periods and wars lined up, and so it all started to seem like repetitive nonsense to me. By the time I got to the New Testament and all the randomly organized epistles, I was ready to be spending my time with some other book.
Recently, however, I decided to revisit the Bible, and this time I wanted something that was more sequential--the prophets interspersed where they would have been in the chronicles, the epistles edited into the acts of the apostles, the gospel all harmonized. Furthermore, I wanted a KJV translation, and if it could include contextualizing historical narratives throughout, all the better. I did some research, and this book seemed to be the best bet.
Unfortunately, the editors of this "chronological" Bible kind of sidestep some of the very tasks that were their ostensible mission, and in large part this is because the overarching editorial directive for this edition appears to have been one committed to the literal truth and divinity of every word in the Bible, inconsistencies be damned. There are some literal redundancies in the Bible--passages that are repeated almost verbatim. I would have preferred an edition bold enough to excise all but one of the repetitions (and/or to reconcile them with parentheticals in the few places where they change), but such cutting would apparently undermine the divine inspiration of the redundancy, so we get them side by side. Where there are obvious inconsistencies in the repeated passages, the editors do cartwheels trying to justify how both versions could have been literally true and why the "authors" of the Bible would have deliberately included both versions. In passages where the dissonance is especially strong, like the many repetitions of Kings to be found in Chronicles, which was written to be much more propagandistically pro-David than the earlier text, the editors have explicitly kept the competing narratives apart, spinning them as a "Priestly Version" and a "Prophetic Version." This not only fails to achieve the "chronological" sequencing that is the whole point of reading this edition, but by constantly alternating between the two versions and interrupting them with editorial introductions meant to deny that they're different, you don't even get the overall tonal effect of the respective texts. If you read Kings by itself, then you'll get a full story and will understand what the takeaways of that story are. If you then read Chronicles, you'll get the same story once again (with some subtle and not-so-subtle changes), but you'll get a different set of takeaways. A good "chronological version" would give us the best of both texts, minus all obvious repetitions, in order to tell the completest version of the story including all the various takeaways. This version, however, is just confusing and exhausting. Where this version has the most significant task to achieve, it fails most miserably.
The editorial notes are also academically dishonest at times, positing historical and archeological facts that no historian or archeologist would agree with. This is likewise because of the editors' overall desire to prove the literal truth of every word. Thus, they present some "scholarly" information about the historicity of Moses that would only be accepted in fundamentalist religious circles, and they don't even mention that this contradicts the findings of all scholars who don't have a religious objective.
My two-star rating is for the composition and editorial notes of this version specifically, not of the Bible itself. Somebody looking for a sequential, narrative-based version of the Bible, who doesn't mind if it's abridged so long as it's "complete," and who is more interested in clearly seeing the truth contained in the message(s) and stories rather than holding on to the idea that the Bible is a flawless historical record of facts should look elsewhere for an edition. If you're like me, this book will only frustrate you further rather than solving any of your confusion over the Bible "not being in order."