It's been a while since I commented on the current themes.

I'm less familiar with the Prophets than any other section of Scripture, so this is an interesting part of the project. I've been spending much longer on the summaries than usual, mainly just trying to figure out what's actually being said.

As I've said before, keeping that discipline with the more obscure books is turning out to be the biggest benefit of the project for me personally.

My confidence with Isaiah has increased immeasurably over the last two months, and I'm looking forward to hopefully the same effect with Jeremiah.

I can't believe how quickly the months are passing! Isaiah seemed an age away when I started, but now it's done. This time next year I'll be on the home straight.

It's two years to the day since I started Bible Summary. And what a chapter to celebrate! Isaiah 53 is surely one of the greatest in Scripture.

Some parts of the Old Testament seem to point only very obliquely towards the New, but not in this second section of Isaiah. Every chapter is rich with anticipation of Christ.

To ice the birthday cake, I also just passed 100,000 characters for the project.

Thanks again for all your encouragement. November 2013 is beginning to seem not so far away. What am I going to do when I finish?

Now this could be an interesting week..!

I love the book of Ecclesiastes. It's known as one of the most miserable books in the Bible, but where others see only doom and gloom, I consistently find reassurance that my bleaker thoughts are not outside of what Scripture comprehends.

I first discovered Ecclesiastes in the midst of teenage depression. Until that point I'd thought that the Bible was all rules, platitudes and miraculous stories (how little I knew!). I was astonished to find a book that more than understood my fairly negative take on the world.

"Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!" (Ecclesiates 1.2)

Ecclesiastes has been a touchstone for me ever since. And I've found as much treasure in it for the highs as for the lows.

A number of months back I was invited to contribute study notes for a forthcoming edition of the Youth Bible. I was unsurprised to find that Ecclesiastes was still available and I jumped at the chance.

I had recently started Bible Summary, and I decided to skip ahead and write chapter summaries as a way of getting to grips with the key themes. So I'll be starting Ecclesiastes tomorrow with a provisional set of summaries for the whole book.

It will be interesting to see how many of the provisional summaries make the final cut. (And, for that matter, how much of what I wrote for the Youth Bible makes the final publication. I'll let you know when it comes out!)

"Of the making of books there is no end." (Ecclesiastes 12.12)

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:

1. English grammar
2. Using the Twitter API
3. The geography of Ancient Israel
4. The workings of the mainstream media
5. The idiosyncrasies of English Bible translations
6. How tempting it is to sell out
7. How much longer the Old Testament is than the New
8. Methods for preventing comment spam on web forms
9. The middle chapter of the Bible
10. The kindness of the great majority of those who get in contact

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?