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:

• Genesis 1 (100+ retweets)
• Exodus 3 (47 retweets)
• Leviticus 18 (45 retweets)
• Numbers 30 (22 retweets)
• Deuteronomy 8 (33 retweets)
• Joshua 24 (25 retweets)
• Judges 19 (12 retweets)
• Ruth 2 (9 retweets)
• 1 Samuel 17 (22 retweets)
• 2 Samuel 22 (25 retweets)
• 1 Kings 18 (15 retweets)
• 2 Kings 2 (13 retweets)
• 1 Chronicles 17 (22 retweets)

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:

• Stories that they already know (see Exodus, 1 Samuel)
• Chapters with naughty words or macabre themes (see Leviticus, Judges)
• Chapters addressed to 'you' (see Deuteronomy, Joshua)
• Psalms to the LORD (see 2 Samuel)

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...