He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz.

• 2 Kings 19:2

Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings.

• Colossians 4:14

Ahab had said to Obadiah, “Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals.”

• 1 Kings 18:5

NOTE: This is not the same Obadiah as the book of Obadiah.

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

• John 11:48

By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions concerning the burial of his bones.

• Hebrews 11:22

All these verses above have the name of a book in the Bible, but none of them from that book.

Maybe I felt impish … the day that I wrote this?

Please, do not respond with, do you not always feel impish?

I thought back to one of the hardest quizzes for me to get without at least looking at the Bible’s table of contents – putting all the books of the Bible in alphabetical order (English).  You just do not think of such things, and I had to create a skeleton of some books and then constantly recite the books in the Bible until I realized that I had missed a few.

But then, being educated as an engineer, numbers are important to me.  All these questions pertain to the names of the books.  As such, there will be no Bible Reference section.

The questions in this quiz can definitely be considered trivia questions.  I usually try to weave some Bible stories, as a minimum, but like I started, I felt impish.

If there is a numbered book, 1 John for instance, the digit counts as one letter (digit).  Thus, 1 John would be 5 “letters” long.  I could have gone to “first, second, and third,” but I wanted to keep it somewhat straight forward.  And the spaces do not count, thus we might think of keystrokes not counting the space bar.

All the answers are based on the English words for the books, and I used the present NIV names for the books.

The Questions:

	Question	Answers
1	What book of the Bible has the shortest name?
2	What book(s) have the longest name in the Bible?
3	What book name is more than two words?
4	How many Bible books end with the letter “s”?
5	How many of the Bible book names in question 4 are the name of a person?
6	How many books in the Bible are four letters long?
7	What is the only numbered set of book with three books?
8	Thinking of the numbered pairs (only two books), how many are there?
9	Of those answers for question 8, how many of these are a person’s name?
10	And for a nasty question to close, from the book with the lowest number of letters through the book(s) with the most letters, in counting the letters of each book name, would any number of letters be missing?  I took the time, but you can just guess.  Warning: My brain hurt afterwards.

Okay, I confess, I went to the table of contents rather than try to do this by memory, but this exercise has reminded me of all the memorization that I did in Sunday school during those years when a child’s mind was a sponge, ready to absorb anything.

Is this purely trivia?  This quiz …  maybe so.  But memorizing the minor prophets and all the books of the Bible in order helps me find what I am looking for a lot quicker.  We used to chant the minor prophets.  Without looking at the table of contents: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.  Confession: As I quickly chanted this a few times in my head, I was chanting faster than I typed, and that got confusing.  Also, in my haste, the spelling, prior to editing was atrocious.

An interesting tidbit is that all the books of the Bible starting with “T” are in the New Testament and, aside for the numbers, they are all consecutive books, descending in book name length.

Right before this group of five books starting with a “T”, not counting numbers, are four Pauline letters that can mess people up.  I have heard a couple of mnemonics that help.  Gophers Eat Pop Corn, or your favorite “G” animal, like giraffe, groundhog, gorilla, anything to get G-E-P-C.  Also, I think most people know that Great Evangelists Pray Continually (G-E-P-C).  Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians.

Knowing such things helped my age group win more than our share of Bible challenges before we went to the individual Sunday school rooms.  In an assembly room, we would pray, sing a song, and then have a few Bible Verse Challenges – the person that got the verse first, and raised their hand, got to read the verse.  From about third grade through the sixth grade, our class, for some odd reason, started to dominate that game.  That made us even more energized to learn something once we got to our classroom.

And the old adage of opening a Bible in the middle and you should always end up in the Psalms is not accurate these days.  The idea was that you might not be accurate, and the Psalms were near the middle and the biggest target, 150 Psalms.  But with a large concordance in the back of the book and a few pages of maps, you will almost always land in Isaiah, another large target with 66 chapters.  I looked in only six Bibles in the house.  I excluded the concordance and maps.  I divided the page number for the end of Revelation by two.  Only once did I get in the Psalms, in an NASB Large Print Bible.  It was the only one that was not a study Bible.  You cannot control where the author of the study notes is going to devote a full page to some topic or other.  In my NIV Study Bible, I landed about two-thirds of the way through Proverbs, the Serendipity Group Study Bible in Proverbs 2 (so close), A.W. Tozer in the middle of Proverbs (chapters 15 and 16), and C.H. Spurgeon between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (Book introductions can throw that off also).  If you have a year in the Bible with everything shuffled, who knows where you end up.  My Max Lucado Bible of that type was Acts 8.  In that Bible, I could flip one or two pages in either direction, and find a piece of one of the psalms.

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The Answers:

	Question	Answers
1	What book of the Bible has the shortest name?	Job (3 letters)
2	What book(s) have the longest name in the Bible?	1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians (14 “digits” each)
3	What book name is more than two words?	Song of Songs, some translations call it Song of Solomon
4	How many Bible books end with the letter “s”?	27
5	How many of the Bible book names in question 4 are the name of a person?	3, Amos, Titus, James
6	How many books in the Bible are four letters long?	9, Ruth, Ezra, Joel, Amos, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Jude
7	What is the only numbered set of book with three books?	1, 2, 3 John
8	Thinking of the numbered pairs (only two books), how many are there?	7, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 &2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, 1 & 2 Corinthians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, 1 & 2 Peter
9	Of those answers for question 8, how many of these are a person’s name?	3, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Timothy, 1 & 2 Peter.
10	And for a nasty question to close, from the book with the lowest number of letters through the book(s) with the most letters, in counting the letters of each book name, would any number of letters be missing?  I took the time, but you can just guess.  Warning: My brain hurt afterwards.	No, with the number ten and starting with Genesis, you must get to Colossians and Revelation, but from 3 to 14, there is at least one.

Whether you did well on this quiz or, ummm, not so well, for the first video, here is Sanctus Real singing Confidence.  Why do we learn all those Bible stories?  They illustrate how God can also work in our lives.

Here is Matthew West singing Truth be Told.  Instead of more verses that contain Bible Book names, let’s have music sung by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Here is Mark Lowry singing God Doesn’t Know.  One of his own compositions.

Here is Luke Bower singing Haunted.  His enunciation is poor, but he sings of being set free, and being made whole.

Here is John Waller singing But God.

Remember those lessons you had many years ago.  And if you did not have those lessons, there is still time to learn.

If you like these Saturday morning Bible quizzes, but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Saturday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.