Friday Review . . . Read the Bible in a Year Plans

This blog entry done by the ESV people came across my Bloglines account this week.

I am capable of becoming interested in the strangest things -- like read the Bible in a Year plans. I had always assumed that if you wanted to read the entire Bible that you would start with Genesis and read straight through to Revelation. To finish in a certain amount of time you would take the number of chapters in the Bible (1189) and divide that by the number of days you wanted to read. Read that number of chapters each day, and your done. Easy.

Silly me. Some read the Bible in a Year plans take you through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in a year. Some have you read straight through Psalms and Proverbs, and some divide them up. Almost all seem to think you need a little Old Testament and a little New Testament each day. Then, there are the Chronological plans which have the advantage of matching the Prophets up with their histories; but reading Job before Abraham just seems wrong. Then, if you want to follow such a plan, you get to try to find one that arranges things to your liking.

That leads me back to the ESV.blog. Somebody with way too much time on his hands has graphed several of the web available reading plans. You can tell at a glance how the reading is arranged. Like I said, I can get interested in the strangest things. (You really should see the Book of Common Prayer's splatter pattern.)

Then, the next day the ESV blog added two more plans to the mix. They are both available for sale in book form from Crossway, the publisher of the ESV; but they each also have an RSS feed button. I haven't actually signed up and tested it, but it appears to be a free RSS feed.

Personally, if I want to read the Bible straight through to get the whole story at once, I prefer the read 20 chapters a day until I'm done method; but I still found this interesting.

JusticeSeeker
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