Reading the Bible

In 2014, I decided to read the Bible in one year. I’d already read every part of the Bible at least twice, one of those in a year as well, but I had never read the Bible cover to cover in order. I’d read it once with one of the standard plans that covers the Old and New Testaments in parallel, and again with a self-designed reading plan that put it in chronological order. (By “chronological,” I mean starting with Genesis, not Job.) For my third full read-through, I decided to read cover to cover, but I was unsatisfied with the various reading plans I found on the internet, so I much more deliberately wrote my own plan to do that, and I shared it on this blog for anyone else who wanted it. After all, whether you’re a believer or not, reading through the Bible is at the very least a valuable cultural exercise, so I thought it would be a useful resource.

I was unsatisfied with the other plans I found because I had begun to notice the importance of the larger narrative structure within books and even, to some extent, across books of the Bible, which is easily missed in the ways we typically read it. People usually read short passages in church or single chapters in Bible studies, and these are valuable modes of study, but they break apart the longer narratives that are intended to be read as a unit. For example, the story of the Flood stretches across four chapters, and in the New Testament, Paul’s letters were each intended to be read in a single sitting.

Unfortunately, many reading plans that cover the Bible in one year do not take this narrative structure into account. The organization varies, with some plans being topical and some being chronological, but even those that run cover to cover often do little better than blindly dividing the text into three chapters a day. Followed strictly, this would put a break in the middle of the Flood narrative, which I feel is the wrong way to read it.

That was the main reason I wrote my own plan: to take the narrative structure into consideration. Specifically, I had two goals in writing it. The first was to honor the layout of the text by keeping coherent narratives intact to the best of my ability. I did my best to place the breaks between days between Biblical stories, and I preserved the single-sitting structure of Paul’s letters except for the longest ones. I also made sure each new book was started on a new day, even for the very short ones. I tried to make the readings consist of whole chapters as much as possible for convenience’s sake, although this was not always possible. For example, all of the clearly written breaks in the action in Mark occur in the middle of a chapter.

My second, sometimes competing consideration was to try to equalize the lengths of the readings based their actual word counts. Since the lengths of chapters and verses can vary widely, simply dividing the text into sections of three chapters as many reading plans do would sometimes result in readings that were three times longer than usual. If you’re on the go, it’s good to have a reliable feel for how long the readings will be.

This is a more difficult standard to meet, and I made a few mistakes in my first draft. Some differences in length can’t be helped. My rule about always starting a book on a new day made some of the readings very short, such as books with just one chapter. A few others were due to cutting the narrative in the wrong place. However, the biggest problem was that in my first draft, I divided the readings based on the word counts for the books (which are much easier to find) than the individual chapters. This still led to more variation in length than I liked, and some readings tripped me up by being much longer than I expected. The longest (Jeremiah 48-52) turned out to be 6,734 words, compared with an average of 2,026 for the whole Bible.

A few months into this plan, I decided to buckle down and measure the word count for each reading by copy and paste.* I used this information to revise the plan and even it out. I still had to include some variation, but it was much improved. The longest reading is now Ezekiel 20-23, with 4,399 words, and the shortest is 2 John, with 302 words. For perhaps a bit better perspective, the longest book I included as a single reading is Lamentations, with 3,411 words, while the shortest reading that is not a whole book is Exodus 24 (The Covenant Confirmed), with 447 words. This last was a byproduct of following the narrative structure, being a small section of narrative sandwiched in between two longer sections of laws and regulations. Most of the readings are fairly close to the 2,000 word average.

---

This year, when I decided to combine some of my past series of posts into essays, I also decided to write a second reading plan—a chronological one that adheres to my same considerations. Again, this is chronological in terms of the stories, beginning with Genesis, as opposed to chronological in terms of the scholarly estimate of when the books were written, which would begin with Job. I considered just referring you to the various chronological reading plans you can find online, but here again, I’m not satisfied with them. Most of the chronological plans don’t really do it right. My benchmark for this is Jeremiah. Many of the passages in Jeremiah have clear dates attached to them, which are not in order in the text, and yet most chronological plans read Jeremiah straight through.

The one exception I could find easily comes from One Year Bible Online, which really tries to put every reading in chronological order. But while I appreciate their dedication to exact chronology, the thing I learned immediately from their plan is that the Bible isn’t as in order as I thought. Ironically, I find this plan to be too strict about it. For example, they put a single verse, Genesis 11:32 (describing the death of Abraham’s father) in its chronological position between Genesis 23 and 24. You can read it that way if you want, but I think that gets too confusing. I also disagreed with the placement of some of the Minor Prophets (which are debated by scholars).

So, just like my cover-to-cover plan, I wrote my own reading plan for reading the Bible chronologically in one year. With the same rules governing the two plans, there are long stretches that are nearly identical. Most of the beginning up through Ruth and most of the end after Acts are almost the same. But where multiple books overlap in time, it’s very interesting how the books run together, and I think it could be a valuable resource.

I did combine the shortest books together because I needed more days in some places, so the three Epistles of John are now a single reading. The shortest reading in this plan is very short: Isaiah 6 (Isaiah’s Call), at 342 words. The longest is still Ezekiel 20-23, but the important thing is that the readings are still kept close to the 2,000-word average. I also included one optional reading; Psalm 127 appears twice in the plan. Psalm 127 is one of the Songs of Ascents (Psalm 120-134), which are clearly organized as a unit, but Psalm 127 is attributed to Solomon, while several of the others are attributed to David. In the interest of maintaining the narrative structure despite being written at a different time, I included it twice.

Both of my reading plans are listed in full below.

* I initially did the word counts using the New International Version, but I have since switched to the newer English Standard Version, which I consider to be the most quotable version of the Bible in widespread use today.

---

Cover-to-Cover Reading Plan

---

Chronological Reading Plan