Do you ever find yourself being asked the question: What's your favourite _____? Only to realise that you don't actually know the answer? It's a conversation starter that comes up all too often, but despite that it's one I've never really been that great at, so I decided it'd be a fun idea to make SomeLists, a spreadsheet with a whole load of completely arbitrary top 25 lists on it. Of course then, being me, I thought, I wonder what would happen if I did this, but for bible books? And so it begins...
Slight disclaimer on this, I'm not meaning to suggest that any bible book is "better" or "worse" or more or less important than any other bible book, the bible in its entirety is God's word, and God's word is good. The criteria I used for ranking these books was entirely based on "how much a particular thing impacted me personally at the particular time I was reading it" and as such I have very little doubt that if I were to do it again, the resulting list would look completely different. The intention is more to be a fun way to look back over the past year at what I've been reading and collect it all together in my mind, and hopefully help someone out in the process. Anyway, without further ado, I present to you, all 66 books of the bible, ranked (kinda...):
Honourable(?) mentions...
66. Job
I don't really know why I put this so low down on the list, Job is an incredible story of persevering through the most horrendous suffering, but the book is 42 chapters long, and for 90% of it I just couldn't follow what was being said, and what I did follow either came across as whiny, or as people trying to lead Job astray, or in a lot of cases both, and as the second old testament book you read in the soul survivor bible in a year, it very nearly killed my motivation to keep on going with it. That said, I'm really glad I did, because like for Job, things got a lot better afterward.
65. Hosea
I don't necessarily have much of a reasoning for the placing of a lot of the minor prophets, but since most of them are essentially saying the same thing they don't tend to rank all that highly on this list.
64. 1 Chronicles
The first 9 chapters consist almost entirely of lists of names, the 10th chapter is a man committing suicide. Later chapters are more interesting, but I'm not really sure what else I can say about this book.
63. Leviticus
"The Book of Law" says it all really.
62. Lamentations
"Everything is terrible"
61. Judges
In summary: Israel does bad stuff, Israel gets conquered by enemies. Israel returns to God, Israel conquers enemies. The cycle repeats. At some point in the book a guy gets killed with a tent peg to the head, but since I couldn't even follow who he was or why he was killed at the time Judges remains at 61.
60. Deuteronomy
"The second law" in parts similar to Leviticus, but ranked higher on this list because of the first part of chapter 31, in particular verse 8: "The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”
59. Zechariah
58. Ezekiel
Just plain weird for the most part, I'm not really sure what I can say about this book otherwise.
57. Joel
56. Obadiah
55. Zephaniah
54. 2 Samuel
Not entirely sure why this ended up so much lower than 1 Samuel, but the fact it doesn't really mention Samuel at all was mildly confusing. It's more David's book.
53. Amos
52. Song of Songs
I honestly just found this book kinda weird. I get that it has it's place, but it's not really for me.
51. Exodus
Starts off well, with the escape from Egypt, then turns into a huge drag. Mostly ranked this low because of how it killed my motivation to read the bible in 2017 before I had the structure of BIOY to help me out, but I'm glad I was able to stick with it. My best advice for this is to keep going, because it really is worth it.
"Extended" list:
50. Nehemiah
The last book I read as part of bible in a year covers the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, and is a good reminder of how God is faithful, and if he has promised something he will keep his promises regardless of the opposition we might face.
49. Jude
A very short book, Jude encourages perseverance in faith, and warns of the dangers of ungodliness.
48. Proverbs
One of the more varied books in the bible, proverbs is essentially a book of good life advice, and as one of two books stretched out over the entire year of BIOY was fairly hard to place as it wasn't tied to a specific point of the year. I'd probably have placed it higher, but on occasion it seemed like a lot of what it was saying was repeating things that had already been said with a slightly different wording, so it's here instead.
47. Haggai
46. Habakkuk
The best way I could describe this book, is that God works in ways we wouldn't expect, and although we don't often get a response quite so direct, we shouldn't lose hope, because he has a plan that is so much greater than we could ever possibly hope to imagine
45. Revelation
A vision of the end times. There are a lot of different interpretations for this book, and as such I'm probably not really qualified to even begin talking about it, but the writer employs some incredibly powerful and vivid imagery, and as such, it has stuck with me.
44. Genesis
Probably the most well known book of the bible, it seems somewhat backwards perhaps that the beginning of all things should directly follow the end on this list, but I have discovered something of a new found appreciation of Genesis re reading it in 2019, and whatever your opinions of this controversial book might be, there's no doubt it presents a truly incredible origin story.
43. Mark
The first of the four gospels to appear on this list, I don't really know why, but I just didn't "click" with Mark when I first read through it as part of BIOY. (I've since led bible studies on it, what a world...). Mark is the shortest of the four gospels by quite a significant margin, but at the same time arguably contains the most "stuff". It's a pretty good starting point for someone who has never read about Jesus life before, but the book doesn't hang around. It's event after event after event after event. Despite this though, it still somehow manages to capture just how human Jesus is. Far too often we think of Jesus as this superhero type character defiantly walking into every situation without fear, but reading Mark 14, where Jesus literally says "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" sharply jolts us back to reality. He was a human, just like the rest of us, with very human emotions, and it doesn't bear thinking about what he went through for our sakes.
42. Numbers
The Israelites wander the desert, guided by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, they are in the presence of God in a very physical sense. As backwards as it might seem, I was pretty surprised by the number of numbers in this book, quite a lot of it is essentially a census, which I wasn't expecting when I picked it up to read, but in hindsight makes perfect sense...
41. Ezra
The return of the exiles, and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem
40. Psalms
Like proverbs, this was pretty difficult to place, as it's one of two books that were spread out throughout the entire year rather than a bit of it, but I put Psalms here because it's significantly longer, and as such more varied, and definitely has a lot more stand out moments than proverbs did, in particular with respect to foreshadowing other things.
39/38. 2 and 3 John
I couldn't really separate these two, since they're both very short and pretty similar letters.
37. Philemon
Another new testament letter, a lot of these are ranked where they are purely because they are too short to properly compare with other books.
36. Malachi
35/34. 1 Kings and 2 Kings
The story immediately following the death of king David. Covers the reign of Soloman, as well as events with the prophet Elijah and Elisha
33. Nahum
A prophecy against Nineveh
32. Micah
31/30. 1 and 2 Peter
29/28. 1 and 2 Timothy
27. Titus
26. James
