Week 1 Reading the Psalms
This year I’m aiming at reading one psalm per day.
My general rule in reading-through is to start at page one and keep turning pages. But the psalms face me with two problems.
The first is qualitative. The psalms are tight & focused & concentrated writing. It’s like they ask: why use a hundred words when ten will do? The Psalms are Qualitatively Different from narrative or history. I can’t read them the same way.
I think the reading-comprehension mechanism works like this: I have a (basically predetermined) Personal Absorptive Capacity – meaning that at some point I can’t take in any more. But an added feature is that my Absorptive Capacity is not uniform across different literatures. For example I could read ten chapters in Genesis and (more or less) keep my brain on track. If I try reading ten psalms I’m derailed after the first couple. Psalms are qualitatively different.
My second (and related) concern is quantitative. In my bible the Old Testament is 1334 pages long. Out of those 1334 pages the psalms run from page-763 to page-896. Which means they take up 133 pages – about 9.97001% of my OT. If I’m doing an unmodified consecutive reading plan I might need to read ten psalms in a day. I guess I could read the words but I’d start tailing-off before I’m done. The quantity would kill me.
I can manage the quality & quantity better by reading one psalm per day. [I’m hoping to read everything else in order.]