On Memorizing the (Whole) Bible

When I read Ruth in Hebrew I can still hear my first Hebrew teacher, Dennis Magary, declaiming the text. In class, when students would ask about a particular construction, Magary would pause for a moment, and then say, “It doesn’t occur.” If nothing else, I thought, that’s a neat teaching trick. None of us could call his bluff! But, John Monson claims in this rollicking podcast, Magary has the whole thing memorized. 

If you want to do the same, take a look at Kim Phillips’s article on medieval Bible memorization techniques: 

The verbatim memorisation of large stretches of the biblical text is almost entirely neglected today. We might do ‘memory verses’, but what about ‘memory chapters’ or ‘memory books’? For medieval Jews and Christians, on the other hand, large-scale scripture memorisation was a vital part of spiritual formation. Could it be that this neglect, perhaps encouraged by the ready access we have to the bible via our phones, means we are missing out on a once-treasured tool for discipleship?

Large-scale text memorisation played a significant part in education and spiritual formation throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. This involved the disciplined training of one’s memory via intricate mnemonic techniques. Memorisation devices and techniques were discussed at length by various classical and medieval authors. This training aimed not at the ability merely to reel off large stretches of text parrot-fashion, but rather to encode a text in one’s memory in such a way that any part of the text could be retrieved at any point, or systematically searched.

Kim recommends beginning with the book of Psalms:

In historian Mary Carruthers’ fascinating study of memory in medieval culture, she notes: ‘The book which Christians, both clergy and educated laity, were sure to know by heart was the Psalms.’ In a recent study of manuscripts created as memory aids by members of the medieval Jewish community in Egypt, I have come to similar conclusions. Among all the biblical texts, the Psalter is the most frequently memorised, and this was not merely the feat of an exceptional minority, but was attained by a range of the Jewish community.

Or take Ellie Wiener’s account of memorizing the entire book of Job in Hebrew in 6 months: 

My routine was as follows: rising early, I would start familiar chapters of Job rolling through my head soon after popping out of bed. As my memorised chapters accumulated, I developed an elaborate system of rotating chapter review, practicing chapters every day until I felt confident to review that block of text every two days, then every three. Eventually, before arriving at Tyndale House to begin the work day, I had already gone over 7–10 chapters in my head. I was becoming a ‘mobile Job,’ able to bring the book with me to the gym, the shower, or the streets of Cambridge.

Then I devoted my first 60–90 minutes of library time to reviewing my most recently learned (and therefore most tenuous) material and adding new verses. My brain’s ability to absorb Hebrew happily increased over time, allowing me to raise my rate of acquisition: initially I added 5–6 new verses per day, and by the end, I was learning 8–10 new verses per day. … After finishing the whole book, I ran through 14 chapters in my head every day, 6 days per week, such that I would complete Job twice per week. With the text now well secured, I review just 7 chapters per day before coming to the library.

Or, if you prefer, be like Paul and memorize the whole Bible in Greek. According to E.P. Sanders,

“Paul had probably memorized the text of the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture. … Christian scholars with whom I have discussed this usually regard massive memorization as being so difficult that it is not worth considering as a possibility. Jewish scholars, however, think that it is not only plausible but probable. Jewish scholars still live in a world in which a good rabbi can quote not only the Bible but many rabbinic passages as well. They are consequently better positioned to understand the ancient world. … We would all understand Paul much better if the words of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures were running through our brains, as they were through his.” - E.P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (London: SCM Press, 2016), 73-74.

As a modern analogy, someone in my household observed that any concert pianist will have 10’s of thousands of bars of piano music committed to memory.

Full disclosure: I am not currently engaged in any large-scale memorization project. Baby steps.

Peter Brown and Learning Languages

Interviews with and bios of Peter Brown routinely mention his extraordinary facility with languages ancient and modern. For example:

Thomas D’Evelyn (1988) for the Christian Science Monitor on the occasion of Brown’s award of a MacArthur Genius grant: “Brown learned modern languages - German, French, Italian, and Russian - before Greek. He knew the impact of the Middle Ages on modern man before he knew the classics, which gave him a unique view of his field.”

The Library of Congress (2008) on the occasion of Brown’s award of the Kluge Prize: "As Brown developed linguistic capacity in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, as well as in the major classical and European languages, he reconceived Western history from the sixth to the 11th century as a pan-Mediterranean era.”

Ruby Shao (2017) in The Daily Princetonian: “Every day, he wakes up at 4 a.m. He then studies up to three languages, each for an hour, using books and recordings. Language learning constitutes Brown’s main hobby. He dismissed his familiarity with over 20 languages as ‘not so difficult,’ given the numerous cognates involved. ‘I speak as many as I need for traveling,’ he said.”

Joseph Epstein (2023) reviewing Brown’s memoir: “In Journeys of the Mind he seems always to be off learning another necessary language, contemporary or ancient, for the composition of his own books. After the Latin and Greek he acquired in school, he learned German and subsequently the modern romance languages. Then there was Hebrew, which he learned ‘as a prelude to Syriac.’ He resolves one day to learn Coptic to be able to read Manichaen in manuscript, and eventually does so. In preparation for travel through the Middle East, he acquires Arabic, also Ottoman and modern Turkish. On page 699, in the penultimate sentence of the last page of his book, he reports, ‘I have begun to read in Ge’ez (in Classical Ethiopic) texts that still echo, at a vast distance of time and space, the controversies and ascetic legends of Syria and Egypt of the fifth and sixth centuries, which had trickled down the Nile and Red Sea to Ethiopia, to yet another “micro-Christendom” founded in late antiquity and still surviving in the Horn of Africa.’”

The part of Brown’s 99-chapter autobiography that left the deepest impression on me is his description of how he went about preparing to write his biography of St. Augustine by reading through Augustine’s entire massive oeuvre in Latin:

“First and foremost, these were years of deep reading. I would sit in a large armchair with a board across the arms and read my way through the folio volumes of the works of Augustine published … between 1679 and 1700. I would work my way down those generous pages noting on a piece of paper the page … and the position … of the passages that interested me. … Then, having read through the entire text, I would return to copy into my notes those passages that I had marked. This method of taking notes had a direct effect on the way in which I absorbed the works of Augustine. I hardly ever made a précis of what Augustine wrote. Instead, I went out of my way to copy by hand every passage in the original Latin. By doing this, I aimed to capture, through citations, not only what Augustine said, but, quite as much, how he said it. By taking notes in this way, I found myself catching his tone of voice.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press), 249.

Later in the book, Brown reflects on the difference between this sort of extensive reading and the fluency that it produces, and grammatical analysis:

“Confronted with a class of keen graduate students, mainly in classics and comparative literature, I suddenly realized that I knew the Confessions inside out—but I did so only as a historian, instinctively looking at it for evidence of Augustine’s life and times. I had never expounded it as a masterpiece of Latin prose. I had been like a window cleaner, wiping a pane of glass until I could see through it into the fourth century. Now I was expected to be a chemist, and to analyze the texture of the glass itself. I had to know how to parse each sentence in correct grammatical terms. … I realized that I had read Augustine’s entrancing Latin for so long that I took it for granted.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind, 566.

All very impressive. But what is the point? Brown puts it this way, in a 2024 interview with Nawal Arjini in The New York Review:

“I travel because it always surprises me. Places and monuments, works of art and landscapes are never quite what one imagines them to be. Nor are people. Some of the languages useful for my research abroad are what we call “dead” languages: Latin, Greek, classical Hebrew, Coptic, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), etc. These are keys to entire past civilizations. But even in the modern world, languages are a reminder that all societies have their own surprises. To attempt to read and use languages other than one’s own, even if only a few phrases, is a mark of respect for the otherness of other people. For this reason, I have always encouraged my students of late antiquity to learn not only the classical languages but the languages in which modern scholarship has been conducted, so that they realize that historical research is a worldwide matter, and that it is many centuries old—like a great symphony that has been playing for centuries.”

Now, where was I?

I submitted grades for my fourth and final fall semester course on December 31, just before year’s end and the start of a six-month sabbatical. Dreams of a research trip to Israel have given way to an “undisclosed location” closer to home:

Academic sabbaticals are more about uninterrupted research time than they are about rest, and I actually expect to get more writing done without the disruption that travel brings. I do look forward to being free of meetings, marking, and administrative responsibilities for the next several months, and I dearly hope finally to be able to see through to publication a few of the essays I have drafted over the last few years—beginning with the paper on Josephus's ethnonyms that I shelved at the start of the fall semester. 

Other goals include finally completing a reading of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek—just Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, and part of the minor prophets to go!—making my way through some of the major books in Biblical Studies that I have purchased and not read; and, yes, some rest and time with family.

I hope to avoid the curriculum the Mock Turtle lays out in Alice in Wonderland, though parts of it seem all too familiar: 

“Reeling and Writhing ... to begin with ... and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

A 2024 Reading Retrospective

I logged 36 completed books in 2024, my highest tally in six years of Reading Retrospectives. Sixteen of them were audiobooks—also a record—and I counted Sandra Boynton’s hilarious introduction to chocolate, which is perhaps cheating. Why so many audiobooks? A few (overlapping) reasons:

1. I wasn’t putting as much listening time into Greek and Hebrew;
2. I managed to be more active for part of the year;
3. I seldom sit down just to read books anymore. In fact, I now look for an audio version even for books in my field because I am more likely to get through them that way. When I sit (or stand) at my desk, I am typically preparing for class, grading assignments, trying (when school is not in session) to write something more substantial, or wasting time on blog posts like this. Or I am on a device reading blogs, scanning the news, doom scrolling on the site formerly known as Twitter, window shopping for a new fountain pen—God knows there are enough needless distractions in my life. Maybe that will change this year.

Reading Highlight: Because it is not available as an audiobook, I asked for and received Peter Brown’s massive intellectual autobiography, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press, 2023) for Christmas in 2023. The book’s 99 short chapters were my bedtime reading for the first six months of the year. Perhaps because I do not aspire to be Peter Brown, I found his account of his life in Sudan, Ireland, Oxford, Berkeley and Princeton, his travels in Iran and Afghanistan, and his language learning completely fascinating. One of several ways it expanded my intellectual horizons was to help shift my mental map of the ancient world: Instead of locating Judaea on the periphery of the Roman empire, I now place it in the center, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Parthian empire beyond the Euphrates on the other. That, I find, changes everything. It also resulted in a new map of the Middle East—another present—that now adorns my office wall.

As usual, here is my lightly annotated list, organized this time by broad category (Biblical Studies, Biographies / Memoirs, Other Non-Fiction, and Fiction):

Biblical Studies

Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. AYBRL. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

[Good evidence, but the argument didn’t quite live up to its billing, imo]

Avioz, Michael. Legal Exegesis of Scripture in the Works of Josephus. LSTS 97. London: T&T Clark, 2021. [Book review here]

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Brock, Brian, and Bernd Wannenwetsch. The Malady of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016.

________. The Therapy of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 2. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. 

[A genuinely fresh take on 1 Corinthians. Like its exemplar, Barth’s Römerbrief, this stimulating two-volume theological commentary is by turns insightful and unpersuasive.]

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014. [Textbook; re-read multiple times, still worth reading]

Finger, Reta Halteman, and George D. McClain. Creating a Scene in Corinth: A Simulation. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press, 2013. [A nice concept; but I won’t be using it again]

Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. Interpretation. Louisville: John Knox, 1997. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Henze, Matthias, and Rodney A. Werline, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters. SBL Press, 2020. [A worthy successor to its 1986 predecessor]

Jipp, Joshua W. Reading Acts. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Levine, Amy-Jill. Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians. HarperOne, 2024. 

[Audiobook; Scot McKnight’s book of the year; effectively punctures multiple Christian misconceptions of Jesus’ Jewish context]

Oliver, Isaac W. Luke’s Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Memoirs and Biographies

Boucher, David, and Teresa Smith, eds. R. G. Collingwood: An Autobiography and Other Writings: With Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

[Cheating a little: I re-read the autobiography in 2023, and finished the essays, which are long enough for a volume of their own, in 2024.]

Brown, Peter. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

________. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 

[As my bedtime reading for the second half of the year, I turned from Brown’s autobiography to the biography of Augustine that launched Brown’s academic career; completed on December 30.]

Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne. Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith. Pittsburgh, Pa: Crown & Covenant, 2012. [Audiobook]

McCaulley, Esau. How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. New York: Convergent Books, 2023. [Audiobook]

Smith, James. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019. [Audiobook]

Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018. 

[Audiobook; I first heard about Tara Westover’s story while living in Cambridge; I met one of the characters in her story – a professor at Brigham Young University – in Washington, D.C. this spring.]

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. 2d ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. [Audiobook; 1st published in English in 1960]

Other Non-Fiction

Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. 3d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016. 

[Audiobook; see this post for the reasons why I think everyone college age and up should read it]

Boynton, Sandra. Chocolate: The Consuming Passion. Random House, 1992.

Cline, Eric H., and Glynnis Fawkes. 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

[A mark of my intellectual seriousness: I read the ‘graphic novel’ version not the monograph.]

Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. [Audiobook]

Lawler, Andrew. Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. New York: Anchor, 2021. [Audiobook]

Payne, Leah. God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. [Audiobook]

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. [Audiobook]

Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Crossway, 2020. [Audiobook]

Watkin, Christopher. Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2022. [Audiobook]

Fiction

Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. 40th anniversary ed. Toronto: McClelland & Steward, 2004.

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954.

Smith, Alexander McCall. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. New York: Vintage, 1998. [Audiobook; the first three books in the series became this fall’s comfort reading]

________. Tears of the Giraffe. Anchor, 2000.

________. Morality for Beautiful Girls. Anchor, 2001. [Audiobook]

Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. Translated by Frances Frenaye. Hill and Wang, 1961. [Audiobook]

________. Day. Translated by Anne Borchardt. Hill and Wang, 1962. [Audiobook]