Jewish Boys and Memorization

If we were to study Jewish culture during New Testament times, we would discover that customarily, boys memorized the first five books of the Bible between the ages of 6 and 10. That’s 5,852 verses total, which means 1463 verses a year, or an average of 4 verses a day. Many of us have trouble even reading through Leviticus and Numbers, but these mere boys learned to retain it in their memory.

By age 14, many of the boys could boast of the knowledge of the whole Old Testament, Genesis to Malachi. To accomplish that feat, they needed to memorize an average of 12 verses per day from the ages of 10 to 14.

Not many of us memorize twelve verses in a month, and we are much older than 14.  Their diligence puts us to shame.  We claim to love the Word of God, yet are we devoted to it?

We say memorizing the whole Bible is impossible.  Yet these boys memorized the entire Old Testament in a mere eight years.  Shouldn't we be able to memorize the entire Bible in twenty years or so?

According to Never Thirsty, there are 31,173 verses in the entire Bible.  There are 7,300 days in the next twenty years.  That means that if we memorized five verses each day for the next twenty years, we will have memorized the entire Bible.  If we memorized approximately two verses a day, we could have the entire Bible memorized in forty years.  So why wait?