Thursday, April 29, 2010

Done

This morning I finished my read-through of the ESV Study Bible, which I began on 3rd January, 2009. It is a thick book, with over 250 pages of articles, in addition to the introductions and notes on the 39 Old Testament books and the 27 in the New Testament.

I have enjoyed using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track my progress, and to keep my reading of the Old Testament, Psalms and the New Testament proportional. I found that I needed to read 4 chapters of the Old Testament [including a psalm] for every chapter of the New Testament, because the Old Testament has 929 chapters, there are 150 psalms, but only 260 chapters in the NT.

It has been a wonderful journey and would be richly rewarding to anyone who is willing to allocate the time. I did it by reading for half an hour to an hour for most mornings of the past 15 months.

The highlight [of many] has been Jack Collins stimulating introduction and notes on the Psalms.

For my next project, which I've already begun, I am reading through Psalms in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. Don't take this to mean I can understand it all, but I can understand some and find that reading is a great way of improving my feeble grasp of the Bible languages.

1 comment:

Gordon Cheng said...

Great stuff! What a blessing.