I'm summarising the Bible on Twitter - one tweet per chapter, one chapter per day.
It's a three-and-a-half year project. I started on 8 August 2010 and I'm on course to finish on 8 November 2013.
The @biblesummary account has 23,928 followers.
Bible Summary has been featured in the news all over the world.
Find out about the project here, check out my progress, or feel free to get in contact.
Chapters 10 to 29 of Proverbs pose two particular challenges for the discerning Bible summariser:
Firstly, the lack of structure.
Chapters 1 to 9 have a very coherent overall theme - wisdom against folly - and each chapter develops an aspect of the theme. By contrast, in chapters 10 to 29 there are about a dozen main themes, which are mixed together verse by verse with no apparent order.
My method for the project so far has been to build a summary around the key themes of each chapter. But there don't seem to be themes in these chapters!
Secondly, the irreducibility of a proverb.
Individual proverbs are actually very well suited to Twitter as a medium. Most proverbs are 140 characters or less, and they convey a single, clear idea through a pair of contrasting examples.
But I'm trying to summarise an entire chapter of proverbs in each tweet. It's very difficult to reduce the length of a proverb without losing precisely the grit that makes it profound in the first place.
So, what am I going to do?
I think I'm just going to pick the three or four images that strike me most from each chapter. I'll look for proverbs that capture the heart of one of the broader themes within the book, and over the course of the 20 chapters I'll aim to cover all the main themes.
I won't even try to preserve the pair-of-contrasting-examples form.
It will be interesting to see whether this exercise reveals structure that I haven't noticed before, or whether I'll be left feeling more than ever that it's impossible to do justice to Scripture within the constraints that I've imposed.
I'm halfway through the project!
It's been an incredible journey so far. I'm brewing an article on what I've learned about Scripture, digital culture and spiritual discipline. But in the meantime, here are ten slightly more unexpected things that I know a lot more about now than when I started:
Thank you all so much for your support!
On to Psalm 118...
One of the most frequently quoted bits of Bible trivia is that Psalm 118 is the central chapter of the Bible. The claim is usually accompanied by various elaborations of its significance - the shortest and longest chapters are on either side, the theme is central to the message of Scripture, etc.
But it turns out it's not true!
The Bible is 1,189 chapters long, so the middle chapter is the 595th.
I'll be posting my 595th summary this coming Saturday. I counted forward and realised to my initial bewilderment that Saturday will be Psalm 117, not Psalm 118. I thought I must have unwittingly posted a chapter twice or missed a day or something. But then I did some Googling...
Apparently the Psalm 118 thing is one of those Christian folk legends that gets passed around without any fact-checking. (I've done it myself!) Psalm 117 is indeed the middle chapter.
How have I not found this out before?
That wraps up the first book of Psalms! (I wonder why they're not numbered 1 Psalms, 2 Psalms etc.)
These have been some of my favourite summaries so far. I love posting straightforward praise of God each morning. And judging by the number of retweets, I'm not alone in that.
Psalm 23 has had 52 retweets, which puts it in the top 10 summaries overall. Psalms 1, 16, 25, 27, 31, 34, 37 and 40 have all had over 30 retweets.
I've still got three-and-a-half months to go before I get to Proverbs. So, I must say I'm relieved that it's Psalms (rather than, say, 2 Chronicles) that has 150 chapters!
Here we go - I'll be starting the Psalms tomorrow!
I was worried that I would be tired of the daily summaries by the time I got here, and that five months in one book would finish me off. But I don't think I've looked forward to any book more!
In my day job, as Director of Worship at King's Church Durham, I've been challenging myself to include a Psalm each time we gather for worship. That may sound obvious, but our diet has been very much focussed around hymns and songs. It's been incredibly enriching to explicitly link our worship with the songs of Scripture.
The Psalms are a kind of lexicon of worship. Given how much my understanding of the other books I've summarised has grown, I'm really excited to discover what the impact of working through the Psalms will be.
I'm also really looking forward to tweeting straightforward praise of God each day!
I think the Psalms are a kind of project-within-the-project. Reading through the Psalms would benefit anyone... so how about joining me?
I've almost finished Job... which means the Psalms are just around the corner!
I've been looking forward to the Psalms since I began the project. I'm a worship leader in my day job, so it's going to be brilliant tweeting the songs of ancient Israel every day for five months!
I've written another press release to highlight this part of the project. Please do pass it on to anyone you think may be interested!
How's everyone doing? We're nearly four weeks into Job - only two more to go! We've just started Job's closing speech, then we have a few chapters of Elihu, and finally God's response.
Just in case you're feeling lost, here's my original overview of Job. I wrote it ten years ago, in a much more colloquial style. There are a few points where I think I probably took liberties with the text, but hopefully it will help you catch up with the conversation to date.
I've finished the History books! That always feels like a very significant step on the journey through Scripture.
Next come the Wisdom books, which are probably my favourite in the Old Testament. I've been looking forward to starting Job for weeks!
Perhaps that sounds strange? Job has a pretty gloomy reputation. But the raw honesty of books like Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms has been life and death to me in dark times over the years. I've never been content with a faith that shies away from those realities.
The Wisdom books take the reality of the human condition very seriously. And they also take God very seriously. There's a spring of life in the coming together of the two.
So, on to Job...
The first time I read the book of Job - about twelve years ago - I was expecting it to be only a couple of chapters long. I had assumed that the children's version was all there was to it. I was bewildered as chapter after chapter of poetic dialogue sailed over my head.
In fact, that bewilderment partly accounts for this whole project!
In an attempt to get to grips with the arguments of Job, I condensed the book into a two-page script. That summary was one of the first things I ever published on the internet!
I'll have a head-start as I get underway tomorrow...
These shorter books are passing quickly! Ezra and Nehemiah are done, and Esther will be finished in a week. That will be the end of the history books!
Somewhat appropriately, I've just passed 10,000 words for the project.
After the run of evil kings leads inexorably to the exile, it's a relief to find a new start for Israel in these recent books. But you can't quite escape the comparison with the great heights of earlier generations.
The Israelites felt the contrast themselves: in Ezra 3 the older people weep for the glory of the former temple even as the new foundations are laid.
This seems a very unresolved new beginning.
When I was first planning Bible Summary, a friend said to me, "Perhaps you'll have ten- or twenty-thousand followers by the end." I can clearly remember how inconceivable either of those figures sounded.
As it turned out, I gained my first 10,000 followers in the space of five somewhat crazy days between Genesis 6 and Genesis 11.
The next 10,000 have taken a lot longer. I reached 19,500 followers a few months ago and then the numbers fell for several weeks. I'll admit to being disappointed at the thought of not reaching the milestone.
But who can tell the ways of Twitter?! The numbers started rising again, and with over two years still to go, my summary of Nehemiah 2 went out to 20,010 followers!
By way of geeky celebration, I've added the number of followers I had for each summary to the chapter pages.
Thanks for following!
I'm one third of the way through the project today!
It's only a couple of weeks since I posted my thoughts on completing my first year, so I don't feel the need to do much navel-gazing.
But I've recently added the number of retweets for each summary to my database, so here's the most popular chapter from each of the books I've completed:
A couple of observations...
If I posted the top 20 chapters overall it would be pretty much all Genesis, which undoubtedly reflects the amount of coverage the project had at that time as much as it does the popularity of Genesis.
I guess the book of Ruth is lowest because it's so short. But that does still seem a bit surprising.
People like:
You can now see the number of retweets for any summary by going to the page for that chapter. The retweet count is underneath the summary.
My stats tell me that chapters full of unfamiliar kings are the least popular. I lost more Twitter followers than I gained each day between the middle of 2 Kings and the middle of 1 Chronicles. But here we go again...
For your encouragement: 2 Chronicles is a little easier going than 2 Kings. 2 Chronicles focusses on the kings of Judah, who are a better bunch than the kings of Israel on the whole. And there's generally more about each king in 2 Chronicles so the summaries won't be quite so abbreviated.
Only three more weeks...
A year ago today I put the finishing touches to the Bible Summary website and published my summary of Genesis 1 to zero followers.
365 summaries and over 50,000 characters later I published my summary of 1 Chronicles 28 to 19,513!
As many of you saw, the number of followers rocketed under the gaze of the media coverage shortly after I began, and continued rising steadily for a few weeks. But the hype inevitably gave way to the reality of a three-and-a-half year commitment, and in the recent months the increase in followers has mirrored the fortunes of Israel - levelling off and even falling sometimes.
Not that it's ever been about the number of followers, though. I've reached this one year mark with my focus very much in the same place as when I started: first and foremost the project is a way to discipline and deepen my own Bible reading.
It's been an eventful year for me more generally - not always an easy time to stay disciplined. Your retweets, replies and encouragements have helped a lot with keeping me motivated, so thank you!
The storm of newspaper articles and TV interviews had hardly died down last year when we found out that my wife was pregnant. Our son, Samuel, was born in July! There have been some pretty hard things along the way too, and the story that I've been summarising has become deeply entwined with everything that has gone on.
I think that's part of the point of reading Scripture: it's supposed to get bound up with our lives.
I've read through the Bible start-to-finish several times before, so one of the big surprises for me has been how much of a difference the process of summarising has made. I've been forced to notice all kinds of details and themes that I would usually gloss over without really understanding.
One of the biggest pay-offs has been with unpopular books like Leviticus and 2 Kings. The commitment to come up with (hopefully) evenly weighted summaries has meant that I've had to spend time with commentaries - understanding the geography, customs and genealogies that don't naturally interest me very much. My understanding of those books has increased dramatically!
The other pay-off has been in seeing the big picture. I've noticed things in summarising that I'm amazed I hadn't spotted before. For example, I don't think I appreciated how strongly these early books emphasise covenant. I knew in theory that 'covenant' was an important Old Testament theme, but I hadn't really felt the weight of it.
And that's just scratching the surface. Who knows what the impact of the project will have been by the time I finish!
Looking forward, I'll be starting 2 Chronicles on Wednesday, then on towards the Wisdom Literature (some of my favourite books!) This time next year I'll be in Isaiah, and in two years time I'll be on the home stretch. It all seems very doable now!
So here we go... 12 months down, 27 to go...
The genealogies have acted as some kind of time warp - we've gone back to Saul and David!
Yes, 1 and 2 Chronicles are a recap of the events of 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Some passages are pretty much word-for-word repeats, others are summaries or add new material.
I always find it a little frustrating to get to this point. 1 and 2 Kings are definitely not my favourite books of the Bible and as soon as you finish them you have it all again.
But as I've said before, the least popular bits of the Bible are often the bits that you most benefit from paying attention to. So let's see what we find...
One of the most frequent questions I got asked when I started Bible Summary was what was I going to do with all the lists of names.
Well, here I am right in the middle of them, and yes they are some of the trickiest chapters I've done. (Which is only partly due to the fact that my own genealogy has recently gained a generation and I'm consequently a little sleep-deprived.)
The first challenge is actually reading the chapter! It's amazing how easy it is to switch off when trying to read all the begetting. I frequently find that my mind has wandered and I'm thinking about something completely different.
The second challenge is in understanding what's going on. You'd think it would be pretty straightforward - some guy, his son, his son, his son - but these chapters are full of family branches. It can be incredibly hard to follow all the relations. I've spent more time in commentaries as I've read these chapters than almost any so far.
Then finally there's the business of summarising. I've obviously got to miss people out and it's a lot harder with these chapters to decide what to emphasise. I've been trying to understand the point of each genealogy and highlight that. (For example: 1 Chronicles 1 takes us from Adam to Israel; 1 Chronicles 2 shows us Judah's line to David.)
These are never going to be anyone's favourite chapters (Jabez and his best-selling prayer notwithstanding) but this has always been an exercise in engaging more deeply and deliberately with what's there in the Bible. The commitment to write a summary probably pays off most with difficult and unpopular chapters.
1 and 2 Kings have been hard work!
Elijah and Elisha have provided some fireworks, but for the most part the last few weeks have just been long chapters and evil kings.
Most people seem to think that Leviticus is the hardest book in the Old Testament but I'd take Leviticus over 2 Kings pretty much every time.
I'd be looking forward to moving on in a week or so but I'll only be moving on to 1 and 2 Chronicles. This must be the toughest stretch!
I've had another spree of Bible Summary milestones recently: in the last week I've completed my tenth book, passed 7000 words and passed 40000 characters. Today I'm a quarter of the way through the project!
When I started out I couldn't think about finishing the project - it seemed dizzyingly far away. I know I've still got three times as much left to do, but completing the project is beginning to be comprehensible.
It's still just a chapter a day, the same as when I started, but I have a strong sense now of each summary contributing to the greater whole.
That wraps up 1 and 2 Samuel. I've enjoyed these books!
For all the extraordinary events along the way, David's life is a very human drama. It's challenging and also hopeful to see this 'man after God's own heart' get so many things wrong. Perhaps that's the reason why the stories of 1 and 2 Samuel are among the most famous in the Bible.
But I'm getting a bit previous. Although we've had David's 'last words' in 2 Samuel 23, he's actually still with us for another two chapters.
So, on to 1 and 2 Kings...
That brings us to the end of 1 Samuel.
The book has already had its share of Hollywood plotlines (see 1 Sam 19 just for starters!) and now it ends at this awful moment of cliffhanger - our hero is exiled, Saul is dead, the Philistines have invaded, all seems lost for Israel. Can there really be any hope?
Part 2 is on its way...
250 chapters in and Bible Summary is very much part of normal life in the Juby household. The summaries take about 15-30 mins first thing each morning and are published with very little fanfare these days.
The routine continues even on special occasions. I've now published summaries on Christmas Day, New Year's Day, my wedding anniversary, my wife's birthday and my own birthday.
My wife and I have been on holiday recently, staying in various locations in France and Spain. (Yes, I'm showing off!)
Before we left I thought it was going to be a challenge posting summaries each day overseas, but it was almost disappointingly straightforward. I had a wifi connection almost every day and the data roaming charges for my phone were surprisingly reasonable.
The whole experience made me reflect on how inconceivable this project would have been only a few years ago. Both the technology and the medium are utterly 21st Century.
Anyway...
Tomorrow is a significant day for Bible Summary. David is about to make his first appearance!
I'm one fifth of the way through the Bible! I've completed 8 books. There may be a long way still to go but it's going surprisingly quickly.
Reaching Ruth is a relief after those last chapters of Judges! Ruth is set in the same period as Judges and both books anticipate the time of the kings, but they could hardly be more different in tone. Ruth is a beautiful tale of loyalty and God's provision.
I want to be particularly careful with shorter books that the chapter summaries work as a whole, so I've already planned the summaries for the next four days. It will be interesting to see whether that makes a difference.
One happy thing about Bible Summary is that I'm never very far away from a milestone.
I've just passed 30000 characters for the project. In the last two weeks I've also passed 5000 words, 18000 followers and finished the book of Joshua.
It's surpising how much these kinds of things encourage me.
I still feel a bit daunted when I think about the fact that I won't reach the New Testament until 2013, but the small milestones make the project very concrete for the next couple of weeks.
That brings Joshua to a close. I think Joshua has been the most straightforward book so far by quite some way. But next we have Judges...
Judges is probably the darkest book in Scripture. It certainly contains some of the most lurid tales.
I once read through each book of the Bible asking, "If this were the only book I had to learn about God and the universe, what impression would I have?" The picture in Judges was definitely one of the hardest to understand.
I can't believe I'm about to lead a tour of Judges for 18,000 Twitter followers. But here we go...
I've just passed 5000 words for the project!
At this rate the whole thing will come in at 28777 words, which happens to be pretty close to the number of characters I've used so far.
Today marks the biggest Bible Summary milestone since I finished Genesis. I've summarised the whole Pentateuch!
It's taken six months, and they've been very significant months more generally, so it feels good to reach this point.
It's incredible how much my understanding of these books has grown through summarising. There's no glossing over paragraphs that I've only half-understood. I feel deeply involved in the story and themes.
And I'm still amazed at the level of interest in the project. The @biblesummary Twitter account had no followers when I published Genesis 1 (even I wasn't following at that point!). Five books later there were 17,565 followers for Deuteronomy 34.
To celebrate, and as a bit of an experiment, I'm publishing the Pentateuch summaries as a Kindle eBook over at Amazon. I think the Amazon entry is still updating, but at some point you will be able to find it (and buy it if you want to) by following one of these links: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk.
So there we go! Up next: Joshua.
We've just begun the last of the 'Books of Moses'. Even though I've read Deuteronomy several times before, I don't think I've really registered the fact that pretty much the whole book is Moses speaking in the first person. It's Moses giving a kind of commentary on everything that's happened and on the law.
(These are exactly the kinds of things that summarising is helping me to notice. It's amazing how much more I'm taking in this time through.)
I think I remember hearing that Deuteronomy is the book that Jesus most frequently quotes in the Gospels. (Can anyone confirm this? Google is not immediately forthcoming.) It should be an interesting few weeks...
Here's one: I've just passed 20,000 characters for the project! (Including spaces and punctuation, of course.)
We've got about a week left of our journey through the book of Numbers.
There are a lot fewer numbers in it than the title would lead you to believe. The most consistent theme seems to be the Israelites grumbling against God and Moses.
How easy it is to take the blessings we have received for granted and grumble about the details!
Leviticus has a reputation for gore, repetativeness and obscure laws about shellfish and mixed fabrics. As I come to the end of my fifth time through the book I can sympathise to some degree, but we should be careful not to miss the wood for the trees.
It seems to me that there are two main concerns in the law:
Or, holiness and compassion.
The laws that encourage love and respect for one another and generosity towards the poor and outsiders seem very contemporary. Progressive even. Those tend to be the laws that are concerned with compassion.
Many of the laws we find hardest to understand are those concerned with holiness: often to do with the Israelites not taking on the (now extinct) beliefs and practises of the religions around them.
As modern readers we may feel tensions between those two threads, but I think it's more interesting to look for the unity.
The concern for holiness and the concern for compassion were very much integrated in the worldview of the Old Testament people. How were they held together?
Perhaps we could sum it up as: "Love the LORD you God and love your neighbour as yourself."
We're nearly at the end of Exodus. What an eventful and unexpected journey!
The book starts off as Hollywood blockbuster (with a sizable section on epidemiology), then segues to a fairly in-depth law book, and finishes as a construction manual.
There are plenty of things in Exodus that can seem oddly specific. But the whole story of Scripture is about God dealing with people in specific ways.
Humans are always in a specific place, at a specific time, part of a specific culture, with a specific language. It's hard to imagine what it would mean for God to deal with us any other way.
One book down, 65 to go! Yes, completing chapter 50 this morning means that I have now summarised the whole of Genesis.
It's been a crazy few weeks! Bible Summary has taken off beyond my imagination and lots else has happened in life besides. Through it all I've been living in the story of Genesis. Each day I'm thinking about today's chapter and looking forward to tomorrow's. The project is certainly achieving its initial aim of getting me deeper into my daily reading.
I've become aware of so many major themes in Genesis: the chain of blessing that links all the key characters, the events that echo in several different lives, the journey from Eden to Egypt, the repeated promise of the land...
Eden to Egypt is a sad journey in many ways - there are already so many things going on that seem at odds with God's character and aims - but Genesis is also brimming with hope for redemption. God is faithful even when people are faithless, he gives his unmerited blessing again and again.
The book ends with Joseph telling Israel that eventually God will lead them out of Egypt and back to the land he promised to Abraham.
We're moving towards the Exodus. Of which, more tomorrow...
In celebration of passing 1000 words yesterday and 15,000 followers this morning, I've put up a Stats page.
Here are a few slightly geeky observations, appropriate for a post entitled 'Stats'...
You can get about 25 words to a tweet. The average on my stats page says 23.9, but that doesn't include the reference at the beginning of each summary.
I'm averaging 137.5 characters per tweet. If I continue at that rate, the full summary will be 163,487.5 characters long. (How am I going to do that half-character?) That's actually less than I would have guessed.
I've included 'change in followers' as one of the categories. There's usually a drop in followers for a couple of hours immediately after I post, but an increase of about 20-40 overall by the next morning.
If the current rate of growth continues I'll have about 50,000 followers when I finish the project. I've been gaining 20-40 followers each day for a couple of weeks now (excluding the days when Bible Summary is mentioned in the news etc.) so I'm guessing that will be the average. But who knows - maybe everyone will decide to unfollow one day after a particularly poor summary somewhere in Leviticus!
And a bonus, not from the Stats page...
Wyoming is holding out as the only US state not to send a visitor to www.biblesummary.info. Google Analytics informs me that I've had visitors from 115 countries and all 49 other US states.
25 chapters in... halfway through Genesis... three-and-a-half weeks into the three-and-a-half years!
A few notes and reflections...
I'm really enjoying writing the summaries each morning (good job, hey!) November 2013 seems a long way away, but each day I’m very motivated by what I'm going to write tomorrow.
It’s been great interacting with all kinds of people via Twitter and the website. It's really encouraging to hear what people make of the project. Do feel free to add your comments to the posts and chapter summaries!
UCB are broadcasting recordings of a week's worth of summaries five times a day every day. I don't think they play at set times but the recordings are great so it's worth listening out for them.
And I've just noticed that Soul Survivor are starting a 'Bible in One Year' programme today. It's very exciting to see such a major initiative engaging with the Bible. (Although I have to admit I'm a little jealous that they'll be finished so soon!)
I'm stunned by the response to what I thought would be a little project! 11,000 new followers in less than a week and articles all over the world!
I'm still going through all the emails and messages. Many thanks to those of you who've sent encouragement!
I've put up a press section to link to some of the articles that have mentioned Bible Summary. It's been fantastic that so much of what has been said has been positive.
One of the things I'm happiest about is that many of the articles have quoted my hope that this project inspires you to read the Bible for yourself.
BibleStudyTools.com is one place to start if you don't already have a Bible.
A couple of media things coming up:
I'll be commenting more on the actual business of summarising the Bible in the future, but everything has been a bit overshadowed by the media attention this week.
There's a long way to go!
It's quite hard to know what to say in the beginning.
If all goes to plan, I'll be summarising the Bible for the next three-and-a-half years: one tweet per chapter, one chapter per day. That's an intimidating amount of time to commit to doing something pretty much every day! But here we go...
I'll keep within Twitter's 140 character limit (including an abbreviated chapter reference at the beginning e.g. "Gen1:"), and try to convey a summary of each chapter in something like the style of the chapter itself.
Will I really be able to do justice to all 176 verses of Psalm 119 in 140 characters? Probably not. But the challenge of being so brief will force me to engage with the text and understand the key themes. And that's partly the point in the first place - I want to be an active rather than a passive reader of Scripture!
The Twitter account is @biblesummary, and I've built this website to keep track of my progress. I'm only going to post chapter summaries at the Twitter account - no commentary or replies - but I'll be reflecting on the project here.
The commenting system for this site has the option to synch with your own Twitter account, so get involved! Maybe you could read along with me and post your own summary as a comment to each chapter...?
Will I even make it to Exodus? Stay tuned and we'll find out...
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