Family Bible Reading

Today our family reached a major milestone in our family Bible reading. We have finished reading through the entire Old Testament. In addition, we are very close, perhaps a month and a half at most, to completing the entire Bible. More on that in just a bit.

Back sometime in 2003 I began reading a chapter from the Psalms each night with the family at the dinner table before we ate. This reading was the beginning of a second time through the Book of Psalms. The first time we used the New American Standard Bible and we read through Psalms and the Book of Proverbs. We started again, this time, with the English Standard Version. My original idea was to get a feel for how these versions read and compare them by reading them out loud to my family.

After we completed Psalms and Proverbs, I decided we ought to read through the book of Genesis. With those three books under our belt, I got the idea that we could read through the entire Bible. So, we continued reading a chapter from the Bible (or a portion of a chapter if the chapters were too long) before dinner each night. I wanted variety and thought it would be really hard to read the Pentateuch straight through or the major and minor prophets, so I tried to bounce around between the Old and New Testament, between long books and short ones. My one confession is that I summarized the content of some chapters rather than reading each name and line of a genealogy or every detail of a very repetitive section (e.g., descriptions of the tabernacle in Exodus 26-31). For the most part, though, we really did read everything.

I did not keep track of how long it took to finish the Book of Psalms or Proverbs, but I kept pretty detailed records for all the other books. There were several single chapter books that only took one night of reading to finish. Other books, of course, were much longer and took more time. Isaiah, for example, took us 79 days to complete, longer than any other book on our record. We finished the OT today by reading the last two chapters of 2 Chronicles (sometimes I would read an extra chapter just to finish off a book). We have only Romans and Revelation left to read from the New Testament and so I anticipate finishing the whole project sometime in May.

Reading extended passages out loud is a great way to discover the literary quality of a translation. Some places the ESV just flows so beautifully and other places it’s a real dog. Part of it, I’m sure, is due to the fact that it is just plain difficult to create fine prose while translating as literally as possible. My one major regret is that I didn’t keep track of those places where the translation stood out as either exceptional or poor. Overall, though, my impression is that the ESV reads very well, better than either the KJV or the NASB.

My guess is that reading the Bible like this has been more profitable for me than my wife and kids. Normally, they did not follow along with their own Bibles. We just didn’t have enough ESV’s to go around. Besides, when we started the kids didn’t know how to read. They were only 1, 3, and 5 at the time. So, they just listened to daddy as he read the passage. I suspect that the reading, therefore, was more meaningful for me than them. I would try to offer an occasional comment and bit of instruction to highlight the point of the passage. I wanted the kids to learn respect for Bible reading and to learn how to pay attention. It’s been four and a half years now through this project. Their comprehension has definitely increased as they grew older.

I’m not sure what we are going to do when we finish in a couple of months. I doubt we will read through the whole Bible again like we’ve been doing. I like the idea of reading the Bible but I might stick to easier sections, maybe work through specific chapters that deal directly with issues that our children or family are struggling with. On the other hand, I’ve been wondering about the Holman Christian Standard Bible…