That brings Joshua to a close. I think Joshua has been the most straightforward book so far by quite some way. But next we have Judges...

Judges is probably the darkest book in Scripture. It certainly contains some of the most lurid tales.

I once read through each book of the Bible asking, "If this were the only book I had to learn about God and the universe, what impression would I have?" The picture in Judges was definitely one of the hardest to understand.

I can't believe I'm about to lead a tour of Judges for 18,000 Twitter followers. But here we go...

I've just passed 5000 words for the project!

At this rate the whole thing will come in at 28777 words, which happens to be pretty close to the number of characters I've used so far.

Today marks the biggest Bible Summary milestone since I finished Genesis. I've summarised the whole Pentateuch!

It's taken six months, and they've been very significant months more generally, so it feels good to reach this point.

It's incredible how much my understanding of these books has grown through summarising. There's no glossing over paragraphs that I've only half-understood. I feel deeply involved in the story and themes.

And I'm still amazed at the level of interest in the project. The @biblesummary Twitter account had no followers when I published Genesis 1 (even I wasn't following at that point!). Five books later there were 17,565 followers for Deuteronomy 34.

To celebrate, and as a bit of an experiment, I'm publishing the Pentateuch summaries as a Kindle eBook over at Amazon. I think the Amazon entry is still updating, but at some point you will be able to find it (and buy it if you want to) by following one of these links: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk.

So there we go! Up next: Joshua.

We've just begun the last of the 'Books of Moses'. Even though I've read Deuteronomy several times before, I don't think I've really registered the fact that pretty much the whole book is Moses speaking in the first person. It's Moses giving a kind of commentary on everything that's happened and on the law.

(These are exactly the kinds of things that summarising is helping me to notice. It's amazing how much more I'm taking in this time through.)

I think I remember hearing that Deuteronomy is the book that Jesus most frequently quotes in the Gospels. (Can anyone confirm this? Google is not immediately forthcoming.) It should be an interesting few weeks...

Here's one: I've just passed 20,000 characters for the project! (Including spaces and punctuation, of course.)

We've got about a week left of our journey through the book of Numbers.

There are a lot fewer numbers in it than the title would lead you to believe. The most consistent theme seems to be the Israelites grumbling against God and Moses.

How easy it is to take the blessings we have received for granted and grumble about the details!

Leviticus has a reputation for gore, repetativeness and obscure laws about shellfish and mixed fabrics. As I come to the end of my fifth time through the book I can sympathise to some degree, but we should be careful not to miss the wood for the trees.

It seems to me that there are two main concerns in the law:

1. that the Israelites should be set apart from the practises of the nations around them
2. that they should be just and compassionate in their dealings with neighbours and strangers

Or, holiness and compassion.

The laws that encourage love and respect for one another and generosity towards the poor and outsiders seem very contemporary. Progressive even. Those tend to be the laws that are concerned with compassion.

Many of the laws we find hardest to understand are those concerned with holiness: often to do with the Israelites not taking on the (now extinct) beliefs and practises of the religions around them.

As modern readers we may feel tensions between those two threads, but I think it's more interesting to look for the unity.

The concern for holiness and the concern for compassion were very much integrated in the worldview of the Old Testament people. How were they held together?

Perhaps we could sum it up as: "Love the LORD you God and love your neighbour as yourself."

We're nearly at the end of Exodus. What an eventful and unexpected journey!

The book starts off as Hollywood blockbuster (with a sizable section on epidemiology), then segues to a fairly in-depth law book, and finishes as a construction manual.

There are plenty of things in Exodus that can seem oddly specific. But the whole story of Scripture is about God dealing with people in specific ways.

Humans are always in a specific place, at a specific time, part of a specific culture, with a specific language. It's hard to imagine what it would mean for God to deal with us any other way.

One book down, 65 to go! Yes, completing chapter 50 this morning means that I have now summarised the whole of Genesis.

It's been a crazy few weeks! Bible Summary has taken off beyond my imagination and lots else has happened in life besides. Through it all I've been living in the story of Genesis. Each day I'm thinking about today's chapter and looking forward to tomorrow's. The project is certainly achieving its initial aim of getting me deeper into my daily reading.

I've become aware of so many major themes in Genesis: the chain of blessing that links all the key characters, the events that echo in several different lives, the journey from Eden to Egypt, the repeated promise of the land...

Eden to Egypt is a sad journey in many ways - there are already so many things going on that seem at odds with God's character and aims - but Genesis is also brimming with hope for redemption. God is faithful even when people are faithless, he gives his unmerited blessing again and again.

The book ends with Joseph telling Israel that eventually God will lead them out of Egypt and back to the land he promised to Abraham.

We're moving towards the Exodus. Of which, more tomorrow...

In celebration of passing 1000 words yesterday and 15,000 followers this morning, I've put up a Stats page.

Here are a few slightly geeky observations, appropriate for a post entitled 'Stats'...

You can get about 25 words to a tweet. The average on my stats page says 23.9, but that doesn't include the reference at the beginning of each summary.

I'm averaging 137.5 characters per tweet. If I continue at that rate, the full summary will be 163,487.5 characters long. (How am I going to do that half-character?) That's actually less than I would have guessed.

I've included 'change in followers' as one of the categories. There's usually a drop in followers for a couple of hours immediately after I post, but an increase of about 20-40 overall by the next morning.

If the current rate of growth continues I'll have about 50,000 followers when I finish the project. I've been gaining 20-40 followers each day for a couple of weeks now (excluding the days when Bible Summary is mentioned in the news etc.) so I'm guessing that will be the average. But who knows - maybe everyone will decide to unfollow one day after a particularly poor summary somewhere in Leviticus!

And a bonus, not from the Stats page...

Wyoming is holding out as the only US state not to send a visitor to www.biblesummary.info. Google Analytics informs me that I've had visitors from 115 countries and all 49 other US states.