There are forty days in Lent. There are thirty-nine books in the Hebrew Bible. It’s almost too good to pass up. I’ve set myself the challenge of blogging through one passage of each book of the Hebrew Bible every day during Lent - writing an exegesis and simple reflection. I don’t know if I’m going to manage it, I might end up finishing Lent in September, but I’m certainly going to give it a shot. (And announcing it here makes me psychologically more likely to feel bound to it.)

Of course, I’ve been preparing for it already by choosing the passages, a few verses from each book. To choose a few interesting verses, I’ve obviously had to read the whole thing in the past few days. I’ve obviously read through the Bible many times, but never in such a short time - sometimes a single book would take three or four days. Ingesting the whole lot at once gives a much better sense of the whole picture. It really is a great story, apart from the genocide, but we’ll be dealing with that fairly soon.