Today as I studied for a sermon from Psalm 118:24 (This is the day the Lord has made!), I came across someone who claimed Psalm118 was the middle chapter in the Bible. Not wanting to take it at face value, I sat down with an open Bible and a calculator to see for myself. Here are some interesting facts I found.
- There are 1189 chapter in the Bible: 929 in the Old Testament and 260 in the New Testament.
- Psalm 117 is the Middle Chapter of the Bible
- There are 594 chapters leading up to Psalm 117, and 594 chapters after Psalm 117.
- Psalm 117 is also the Shortest Chapter of the Bible. It has only two verses.
- If you average out all the chapters and verses in the Bible, it comes to eighteen. In other words, each book in the Bible has an average of 18 chapters.
- If it takes a minute-and-a-half to read an average chapter, the average book in the Bible can be read in 27 minutes. In other words, you can read through the Bible in 66 segments of 27 minutes. Or, to put it differently, you can read through the average book in the Bible in the same amount of time it takes to watch a half-hour situation comedy.
- If you divide 1189 by 365, you get 3.2575, or about 3 ¼. So if you read 3 to 4 chapters a day, you’ll get through the whole Bible in a year.
- You can accomplish the same thing by reading 2 1/2 chapters of the Old Testament every day, and 3/4 of a chapter of the New Testament.
- There are 260 chapters in the New Testament. And if you take the weekdays of the year (5 x 52), you also come up with exactly 260. So if you read one chapter of the New Testament every weekday (taking the weekeds off), you can complete the entire New Testament in one solid year perfectly.