I'm glad to see that many friends of mine are now doing Bible projects of their own.
The "read the Bible in 60 days schedule" is something I really enjoyed but admittedly it is not a practical schedule for anyone and everyone.
With that in mind, I thought I'd just do a little bit of a breakdown of the Bible in terms of numbers with the goal of making the idea of reading the entire Bible more feasible.
Even if you are already doing your own consistent Bible reading schedule, I hope that you will find the data in his article helpful.
To start off with, I timed myself to see how long it would take to read one page of the Bible.
It took about three minutes.
After doing this I multiplied that number by the amount of pages that are in the Bible.
To come to that number it is very simple of course.
All I had to do was subtract the page number that Genesis chapter 1 starts off on from the page number that Revelation chapter 22 ends in.
What I got from that was the total number of minutes it would take to read the entire Bible. I converted this number into hours and found out that one can read the entire Bible in 78 hours.
Of course this is all based on the assumption of it taking three minutes to read one page of the Bible.
There is a little bit of a problem of measuring the time it takes to read the entire Bible in this way.
The first reason is more obvious – people read at different speeds.
It took me three minutes to read one full page but another person might be slower or faster. However, I think that if you timed yourself, you would find that you could definitely finish a page in less than three minutes. I recommend you do that right now. If you do finish it in less than three minutes that means your total time for reading the entire Bible will be less than 78 hours!
The second factor may not be something that you think of right away.
The amount of words per page varies.
Reading a solid block of text in Ezekiel or Genesis will take longer than reading a poetic page in the book of Psalms. If you look at how many words per page there are on each of these pages it will be obvious that the words in the book of Psalms is much less than those in the other two.
With this in mind I made my "timed" page a page of block text so that I would get a conservative estimate of hours when I added everything up.
--
Now that we have the figure 78 hours we can easily calculate different types of Bible reading schedules.
Perhaps one schedule you could undertake is the "read the Bible in three days with no sleep schedule." Since there are 24 hours in a day, and 72 hours in three days you might have to read a little faster than normal to finish within three days.
I also recommend getting lots of coffee, ice blankets, a personal chef to feed you, an assistant to keep slapping you in the face every time you start to doze off and perhaps headache medicine if you want to undertake this project.
For those of you who are less extreme about their Bible reading habits, want to get as much as they can out of it and don't want to do a schedule that could result in the need for hospitalization afterward I am happy to say there are some other possibilities.
Based on the 78 hour estimate, If you read an hour a day you will finish in – okay the math shouldn't be that hard for this one – 78 days.
How about we just say 80 days and give yourself two days to be lazy.
If you read the Bible at a pace of 30 minutes a day, you could finish it in around five months – 160 days.
If you read the Bible 15 minutes a day you could finish it in 320 days or one year with a lot of days for breaks – 45 days to be exact as there are 365 days a year.
Works best for you? Please don't automatically assume that the 15 minutes a day schedule will work best because you are busy.
One – we are all busy.
Two – some of the quicker paced schedules could be easier to do since a deadline is near in sight.
What is a good way to get started with reading the Bible? Should you read it in the order of the books from front to back (Genesis to Revelation)? Should you read it in chronological order?
One method I think it might be worth trying is reading it in order of books size from largest to smallest because this helps you get over the hump quickly and stay motivated to finish the project.
If you read the six biggest books of the Bible you will have read one third of the Bible.
The six biggest books are, in order, Psalms, Jeremiah, Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Exodus.
Note: I calculated this or not by counting pages, but instead by comparing the MP3 file size of each of these books of the Bible. This method I think is more accurate in calculating an actual book size.
This way you'll be getting the "worst" out of the way.
These books are not only long, they are also rather difficult to read. Genesis is the only exception where it's entertaining to read all the way through and there are many interesting stories and narratives.
You may think that Exodus is interesting but you may be only thinking about the first part of it– everything that happens in the movie the 10 Commandments. This part is action-packed and very exciting. The second half is a little bit more difficult.
In my opinion Ezekiel and Isaiah are the most difficult books of all to get through. There are also many good Psalms but it is long and there is repetition.
Difficult Books of the Bible:
Ezekiel - Lots of temple measurements and details
Leviticus - The section about leprosy and its different kinds was trying
Isaiah and Jeremiah - Great books with wonderful prophecies and good points scattered throughout, but overall a little bit difficult to read. The same principle applies for a lot of the books of the little prophets
Job (middle part) and Exodus (second half) -really, anything written by Moses besides the book of Genesis and the first part of Exodus is going to be a little bit tough to get through. (The specifics of the Mosaic law, measurements and instructions for building things, information on lineage, etc…)
Books that weren't as difficult as I thought they would be: Numbers (sure there are lots of numbers but they were more narratives in this book than I remembered), First and Second Chronicles (I thought this was mostly lineage but there are a lot of interesting stories that overlap the stories of the kings of Judah from the book of first and second Kings)
I am definitely not trying to critique the Bible or say that these parts are less important. For sure, every part of the Bible is important but, also for sure, some parts are much easier to read it than others.
Some of my favorite books to read in the Bible were Ecclesiastes, Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel, Luke, Acts... and I really don't think there's one single boring letter that Paul ripped. There's a lot of depth going on there and a lot of practical information.
I hope you found this blog post useful.
Remember if you fall behind on whatever schedule you are doing make a note of it and then read a double portion to catch up. Or better yet, reading big portions and get ahead in your Bible reading time so that you can afford to take days off.
The regular pioneer hourly requirement per month is 70 hours. This doesn't mean that you have to go out in service 2 hours and 15 minutes every day. You could instead go out for five or six hours on one day and then take a couple of days off. The early in the month early in the week early in the day principal works for Bible reading as it does with service time for pioneers.
Keep up your Bible reading and remember that the main purpose of it is not just to increase your biblical knowledge – it is to get to know him become closer friends with Jehovah – the one who had the book written in the first place.
In the words of Gerrit Losch: "Please don't tell the creator of the universe that you don't have time to read his book every day."
The "read the Bible in 60 days schedule" is something I really enjoyed but admittedly it is not a practical schedule for anyone and everyone.
With that in mind, I thought I'd just do a little bit of a breakdown of the Bible in terms of numbers with the goal of making the idea of reading the entire Bible more feasible.
Even if you are already doing your own consistent Bible reading schedule, I hope that you will find the data in his article helpful.
To start off with, I timed myself to see how long it would take to read one page of the Bible.
It took about three minutes.
After doing this I multiplied that number by the amount of pages that are in the Bible.
To come to that number it is very simple of course.
All I had to do was subtract the page number that Genesis chapter 1 starts off on from the page number that Revelation chapter 22 ends in.
What I got from that was the total number of minutes it would take to read the entire Bible. I converted this number into hours and found out that one can read the entire Bible in 78 hours.
Note: The figures in this chart that I made above differ slightly from the figures I gave in this article but on the whole they are about the same. I also forgot to put in that the Bible divides into 78 hours. You'll notice a line it says this divides into blank hours to read the Bible. I messed up on the chart and I'm to be easy to go back and make a new charge. Sorry. Also the original title was "the Bible in Numbers" but I've changed it to "the Bible in Math" for fear that some might think I was writing an article on the book of Numbers in the Bible and be deterred away from reading this article ;)
There is a little bit of a problem of measuring the time it takes to read the entire Bible in this way.
The first reason is more obvious – people read at different speeds.
It took me three minutes to read one full page but another person might be slower or faster. However, I think that if you timed yourself, you would find that you could definitely finish a page in less than three minutes. I recommend you do that right now. If you do finish it in less than three minutes that means your total time for reading the entire Bible will be less than 78 hours!
The second factor may not be something that you think of right away.
The amount of words per page varies.
Reading a solid block of text in Ezekiel or Genesis will take longer than reading a poetic page in the book of Psalms. If you look at how many words per page there are on each of these pages it will be obvious that the words in the book of Psalms is much less than those in the other two.
With this in mind I made my "timed" page a page of block text so that I would get a conservative estimate of hours when I added everything up.
--
Now that we have the figure 78 hours we can easily calculate different types of Bible reading schedules.
Perhaps one schedule you could undertake is the "read the Bible in three days with no sleep schedule." Since there are 24 hours in a day, and 72 hours in three days you might have to read a little faster than normal to finish within three days.
I also recommend getting lots of coffee, ice blankets, a personal chef to feed you, an assistant to keep slapping you in the face every time you start to doze off and perhaps headache medicine if you want to undertake this project.
For those of you who are less extreme about their Bible reading habits, want to get as much as they can out of it and don't want to do a schedule that could result in the need for hospitalization afterward I am happy to say there are some other possibilities.
Based on the 78 hour estimate, If you read an hour a day you will finish in – okay the math shouldn't be that hard for this one – 78 days.
How about we just say 80 days and give yourself two days to be lazy.
If you read the Bible at a pace of 30 minutes a day, you could finish it in around five months – 160 days.
If you read the Bible 15 minutes a day you could finish it in 320 days or one year with a lot of days for breaks – 45 days to be exact as there are 365 days a year.
Works best for you? Please don't automatically assume that the 15 minutes a day schedule will work best because you are busy.
One – we are all busy.
Two – some of the quicker paced schedules could be easier to do since a deadline is near in sight.
What is a good way to get started with reading the Bible? Should you read it in the order of the books from front to back (Genesis to Revelation)? Should you read it in chronological order?
One method I think it might be worth trying is reading it in order of books size from largest to smallest because this helps you get over the hump quickly and stay motivated to finish the project.
If you read the six biggest books of the Bible you will have read one third of the Bible.
The six biggest books are, in order, Psalms, Jeremiah, Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Exodus.
Note: I calculated this or not by counting pages, but instead by comparing the MP3 file size of each of these books of the Bible. This method I think is more accurate in calculating an actual book size.
This way you'll be getting the "worst" out of the way.
These books are not only long, they are also rather difficult to read. Genesis is the only exception where it's entertaining to read all the way through and there are many interesting stories and narratives.
You may think that Exodus is interesting but you may be only thinking about the first part of it– everything that happens in the movie the 10 Commandments. This part is action-packed and very exciting. The second half is a little bit more difficult.
In my opinion Ezekiel and Isaiah are the most difficult books of all to get through. There are also many good Psalms but it is long and there is repetition.
Difficult Books of the Bible:
Ezekiel - Lots of temple measurements and details
Leviticus - The section about leprosy and its different kinds was trying
Isaiah and Jeremiah - Great books with wonderful prophecies and good points scattered throughout, but overall a little bit difficult to read. The same principle applies for a lot of the books of the little prophets
Job (middle part) and Exodus (second half) -really, anything written by Moses besides the book of Genesis and the first part of Exodus is going to be a little bit tough to get through. (The specifics of the Mosaic law, measurements and instructions for building things, information on lineage, etc…)
Books that weren't as difficult as I thought they would be: Numbers (sure there are lots of numbers but they were more narratives in this book than I remembered), First and Second Chronicles (I thought this was mostly lineage but there are a lot of interesting stories that overlap the stories of the kings of Judah from the book of first and second Kings)
I am definitely not trying to critique the Bible or say that these parts are less important. For sure, every part of the Bible is important but, also for sure, some parts are much easier to read it than others.
Some of my favorite books to read in the Bible were Ecclesiastes, Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel, Luke, Acts... and I really don't think there's one single boring letter that Paul ripped. There's a lot of depth going on there and a lot of practical information.
I hope you found this blog post useful.
Remember if you fall behind on whatever schedule you are doing make a note of it and then read a double portion to catch up. Or better yet, reading big portions and get ahead in your Bible reading time so that you can afford to take days off.
The regular pioneer hourly requirement per month is 70 hours. This doesn't mean that you have to go out in service 2 hours and 15 minutes every day. You could instead go out for five or six hours on one day and then take a couple of days off. The early in the month early in the week early in the day principal works for Bible reading as it does with service time for pioneers.
Keep up your Bible reading and remember that the main purpose of it is not just to increase your biblical knowledge – it is to get to know him become closer friends with Jehovah – the one who had the book written in the first place.
In the words of Gerrit Losch: "Please don't tell the creator of the universe that you don't have time to read his book every day."
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I feel guilty for never having really read your blog before. Great stuff here! Keep it up. I like your honest, positive and tactful assesment of different books. This makes me realize it's a lot easier than I thought. I've noticed having my bible on my phone now makes it a lot easier to read at anytime. I don't have a lamp by my bed, so I can't read a hard copy at night without dreading having to get up to shut the light off when I'm done. However I still prefer reading everything in real print.
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