Bible in a Year

After a year of effort, I finished reading the entire Bible. I had purchased Bible in a Year in late January. For those not familiar with this particular Bible, it’s laid out as follows. The book is dived into 365 sections. Each section contains two excerpts from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament. The first Old Testament reading follows the overarching, chronological narrative starting with Genesis. The other Old Testament reading is non-narrative like Psalms, Proverbs, Sirach, etc. The New Testament flows in chronological order. Each day ends with a small explanation and meditation. Let’s jump into my thoughts on this year-long experiment.

What I didn’t like

  1. The Old Testament is repetitive! Maybe this is the software engineer in me, but I like concise language that gets to the point. The Old Testament prophets seem to go on for multiple chapters about how good or how bad the Israelites had been. I get it; they turned away from God and were punished but God still chose the Jews as His people.
  2. Too many details! Reading about the exact layout and dimensions of the temple and Arc of the Covenant or how various rituals were to be performed caused my eyes to glaze over. It made me wish that the Bible had an appendix that included all those details.
  3. Little context. This has more to do with my understanding of the Bible, but I wish this particular series had more of an overview of each book or an overarching summary of the Old and New Testaments. It was often hard to place exactly what was happening into a historical or narrative context.
  4. The commentary comes at the end. This ties into my previous point. I found that reading the commentary first helped me understand the text slightly better. I got a small primer on what to look for in the text.
  5. Psalms! I just don’t understand them. To me, they’re poetry. Nice poetry, but poetry all the same. I have a hard time using Psalms for prayer and meditation. There’s nothing wrong with them, they just aren’t my thing. I mostly skimmed these.

What I liked

  1. Broader context. When you hear readings at Sunday Mass, they don’t make too much sense because they are read out of context. Reading the Bible daily helps establish a narrative. It’s a rich, complex narrative that you really don’t hear if you only listen to 52 snippets on Sunday.
  2. It’s epic! We just saw the 20th anniversary of the initial Lord of the Rings movie. So epic stories are on my mind. And we tend to forget just how epic the Biblical saga is. Leaders, heroes, villains, triumphs, downfalls, redemption, wars, love — it’s all there.
  3. There’s an app. Only recently, I discovered the Amen app which contains the Bible in a Year as audio recordings. Not only that, but they have daily readings, the rosary, and more as audio with pleasant background music. In fact, it has meditations for anxiety relief and falling asleep. It has become one of my favorite religous apps in the short period of time I’ve used it.
  4. There are others. While I read a physical book, there is also a podcast series with Fr. Mike Schmitz. It’s a different series separate from the Bible in a Year series so you can’t mix and match. The few episodes I listened to were nice as Fr. Mike Schmitz does provide more explanation and context around each reading.

What’s next?

Catechism in a Year! There’s no official book by that name, but I’m going to apply the same principle as the Bible and divide reading the CCC over the course of a year. My copy has 756 pages. That’s about 2.1 pages per day which is completely doable. If I can read the Bible in a year, I can certainly read the Catechism too.

This year, I encourage you to take something large like the Bible or Catechism and get through it by breaking it down into small, digestible chunks. I get it, we’re all busy with work, family, and hobbies. It’s just a matter of choice. Is reading the Bible important enough to you to make time for it? It was for me. Are you in?