Following up on the previous post, I ended it with a data-dump so it’s only proper to spend a bit of time talking about what those figures actually mean… Here’s a roll-up table of the main findings looking at the biblical books specified by season in the Ordo XIII trajectory of the Daily Office that we encounter from the early eighth century through the eleventh century:

Yes, the word counts are anachronistic as this is reckoning NRSV words, not the Vulgate, but they wouldn’t be radically different. I’m allowing it for the sake of comparison later on…

What this chart depicts is if the listed readings were all apportioned equally, how long it would take to read through the material intended for each season.  This is unlikely to reflect reality because of several factors.

First, biblical readings were handled differently in different times and places within the Night Office. Usually they were read during the first nocturn which was usually the only nocturn on ferial days. On Sundays and other feast days, the biblical lesson occupied the first nocturn, the second, and third contain material pertaining to the feast. During the summer, not all monasteries had full readings during the first nocturn given the shorter length of the night. Alternatively, Ælfric praises his monks for maintaining a full three-lesson course during the summer (LME 80). If Matins were roughly the same amount of time each day—that is if the monks were roused at the same time of night—then more time could be devoted to biblical reading on the single nocturn ferias than on the feast days; roughly a third of the amount of in-course reading would occur on these days than the others.

Now—the object of this current series is to look at the contemporary two-year Daily Office lectionary, not the early medieval one. However, if one did have the time and inclination to try and figure out exactly how much time was devoted to these readings and to figure out an exact amount of how much of this biblical material could reasonably be read within the service and what would be relegated to the refectory, this is how you’d do it…

• Identify a place, preferably San Gall/Reichenau given the wealth of surviving material from them online
• Calculate the word counts of the 2nd Nocturn sermones and the 3rd Nocturn homiliae from Paul the Deacon’s homiliary
• Compare the relative lengths of sermones vs. homiliae and determine if they are roughly equal
• Allot roughly that amount of space for a 1st Nocturn biblical reading
• Calculate a balance of 1 nocturn vs. 3 nocturn days within given seasons from the local kalendars
• Start with an assumption that on 1 nocturn mornings, the entire amount calculated for 1st/2nd/3rd Nocturn readings would be focused on biblical reading
• Look at the surviving Bibles/biblical portion manuscripts to see what kinds of chapter divisions they were using and see if these fit the counts in any way shape or form. (I’d think you’d want to work in some math from De Bruyne’s classic Sommaires, divisions et
  rubriques de la Bible latine to help you out here…)

Ok, enough of that… Given the biblical coverage laid out in Ordo XIII, how much of the Bible is actually read in the Daily Office each year? The full OT is listed plus supplemental contents from the Apocrypha (or, the full OT as they thought of it…), but only 25.4% of the New Testament. The Gospels and the Pauline epistles including Hebrews are missing.  These would be the materials covered in Mass, ideally, but we’re not including that lectionary in this reckoning. So:

Christian liturgical communities founded themselves upon the ceaseless and cyclical repetition of Scripture. In the Christian West, our insight into exactly how they intended this to occur is not terribly clear until we move into the first half of the 8^th century. The Ordines Romani were the liturgical instructions intended to clarify how the many liturgical books were supposed to relate to one another within monastic communities. Ordo XIII, which appears in several forms until the unifying Romano-German Pontifical in the 10^th century, presents a scheme that solidifies a norm in the West: The Psalter is prayed through every week in the Office; the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles are read during Mass in the yearly cycle; the entire rest of Scripture is read each year during the Night Office (Matins).

The listing in the 8^th century Ordo XIIIa is rather rough but apportions the various books according to a mix of liturgical seasons and secular months. Thus:

• The Heptateuch (i.e., Genesis through Judges) is read from Septuagesima (the three week pre-Lenten period) until two weeks before Easter (i.e., Passion Sunday)
• Jeremiah is read from Passion Sunday until Maundy Thursday
• The Triduum has its own specific out-of-course readings but includes a lot of Lamentations (this will eventually become the Tenebrae Office…)
• Easter starts with the Acts of the Apostles, then the 7 General or Catholic Letters of the New Testament, and then the Book of Revelation is read until the Octave of Pentecost
• From the Octave of Pentecost the Historical Books (the Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles) until the first Sunday of August
• In August are read the “Books of Solomon”—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the Wisdom of Solomon (likely Sirach as well?)
• In September are read Job, Judith, Esther, and Esdras (the ones in the Apocrypha; Ezra and Nehemiah are probably included in the high summer History read)
• In October are read the books of the Maccabees
• November is given to Ezekiel, Daniel, and the 12 Minor Prophets
• In December/Advent the prophet Isaiah is read

This is the kind of pattern that we see in sources throughout the medieval period. For instance, in Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham written around the year 1000 we see this same pattern repeated (LME 70-77). Ælfric, of course, also includes the responsaries that ought to be sung at these times as well. He concludes his rehearsal of this material with the following note:

“And be it known that, in the course of a year, the entire canon [of Scripture] ought to be read in church, but because we are lazy and slothful servants we read in the refectory whatever we do not cover in church (LME 78).”

This is an important note for two reasons. First, all of these lists are very general because the course of reading each year varied due to the placement of Easter and because of the many saints’ days that interrupted the normal course. Second, by placing the rest of the readings during mealtime in the refectory, an outlet was provided if the full amount of reading was not or could not be completed in church during the time allotted for the Office.

And that’s the key piece here: time. Any amount of reading can be covered given time. But—as we’ll see—time is the chief limiting factor that shapes the potential and possibilities of Daily Office lectionaries, especially those that hold to this classical ideal of reading the entire canon in a year.

In order to consider this subject properly, let’s begin with a quick look at the scope of Scripture itself. What exactly is there to be covered?

As we well know, Scripture is divided into books, chapters, and verses. Honestly, using these as statistical measures to look at reading lengths and reading coverage are of limited usefulness… They’re uneven. There is no standardized length to a chapter or a verse. The earlier we go, the more the problem is compounded too since the chapters we are familiar with now were standardized in the 13^th century and verses in the 16^th. It is far safer, then, to look at word counts rather than chapter or verse counts.

Since the point of this series is to look at the Daily Office lectionary readings now, I’ll use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible as a base text. (I can do the same comparisons with the RSV, KJV, and even throw in the Douay-Rheims which we medievalists like to use as an English language proxy for the Vulgate, but I’ll start with the NRSV for now.) A quick glance at the numbers shows why working by chapters or verses yield inaccurate results:

 

A histogram of the canon as a whole shows that most chapters have somewhere between 15 to 30 verses. (Two outliers, Psalm 119 with its 176 verses and 4 Esdras 7 with its 140 verses have been thrown out…)

A Pareto graph confirms the wide distribution; 80% of biblical chapters are between 11 to 38 verses long which doesn’t give us a great basis for fair comparison.

To say it another way, while the average and the middle number of the set (mean & median ) are pretty close to one another, there’s a significant positive skew to the data set (i.e., there are a lot of big numbers that pull the values around) but the real key is the size of the standard deviation showing us that there’s so much variation in the data set that an average won’t give us the whole story.

We get very similar data when we look at number of words per verse. Again, a strong positive skew with wide variation (standard deviation of 10.5):

At the end of the day, the most appropriate measurement to use is the number of words in the reading. This is a far more reliable metric than chapter or verse because of the wide variation in what those can mean. Furthermore, if we are measuring our biblical readings by the word, we can also associate it to the length of the Daily Office itself which (clearly) has neither chapters nor verses, but is made up of lots of words. Finally, this will also give us a reliable time calculation. Based on a typical speaking speed, we can posit a reading rate of around 150 words per minute—perhaps even dropping it as low as 130 words per minute if we consider a prayerful speed.

So…to jump back to the starting material, what sort of a breakdown does the early medieval period offer? Because we’re working at a general book level, I’m going to break it down in terms of books, chapters, words, and # of days because I’ve always suspected (but never done the math) that’s there some weirdness baked into this system.

	Septuagesima to 2nd Week before Easter				49	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Genesis	50	1,533	36,145
	Exodus	40	1,213	30,199
	Leviticus	27	859	22,780
	Numbers	36	1,288	29,896
	Deuteronomy	34	959	26,470
	Joshua	24	658	17,283
	Judges	21	618	17,557
	Totals	232	7,128	180,330
	Per Day	4.73	145	3,680	24.5	Reading Minutes
	2nd Week before Easter to Maundy Thursday				11	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Jeremiah	52	1,364	40,167
	Per Day	4.73	124	3,652	24.3	Reading Minutes
	Because Triduum/Easter Octave are wacky I’ll skip for now…
	Octave of Easter through the octave of Pentecost				49	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Acts	28	1,007	23,393
	James	5	108	2,324
	1 Peter	5	105	2,468
	2 Peter	3	61	1,546
	1 John	5	105	2,516
	2 John	1	13	305
	3 John	1	15	313
	Jude	1	25	620
	Revelation	22	405	11,405
	Totals	71	1,844	44,890
	Per Day	1.45	38	916	6.1	Reading Minutes
	Octave of Pentecost to the First Sunday of August				49	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	1 Samuel	31	810	23,701
	2 Samuel	24	695	19,278
	1 Kings	22	816	22,765
	2 Kings	25	719	21,845
	1 Chronicles	29	942	18,414
	2 Chronicles	36	822	24,321
	Ezra	10	280	6,596
	Nehemiah	13	406	9,727
	Totals	190	5,490	146,647
	Per Day	3.88	112	2,993	20.0	Reading Minutes
	The First Sunday of August until September				28	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Proverbs	31	915	14,236
	Ecclesiastes	12	222	5,173
	Song of Solomon	8	117	2,520
	Ecclesiasticus	51	1,408	26,763
	Wisdom	19	436	10,118
	Totals	121	3,098	58,810
	Per Day	4.32	111	2,100	14.0	Reading Minutes
	The First Sunday of September until October				35	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Job	42	1,070	17,240
	Judith	16	340	10,312
	Esther	10	167	5,329
	1 Esdras	9	463	11,483
	4 Esdras	16	944	22,304
	Totals	93	2,984	66,668
	Per Day	2.66	85	1,905	12.7	Reading Minutes
	The First Sunday of October until November				28	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	1 Maccabees	16	924	21,765
	2 Maccabees	15	555	15,907
	3 Maccabees	7	228	7,038
	4 Maccabees	18	482	10,567
	Totals	56	2,189	55,277
	Per Day	2.00	78.18	1,974.18	13.2	Reading Minutes
	The First Sunday of November until Advent				28	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Ezekiel	48	1,273	36,151
	Daniel	12	357	10,891
	Amos	9	147	4,017
	Habakkuk	3	56	1,334
	Haggai	2	38	1,060
	Hosea	14	197	4,884
	Joel	3	72	1,833
	Jonah	4	48	1,291
	Malachi	4	55	1,703
	Micah	7	105	2,926
	Nahum	3	47	1,101
	Obadiah	1	21	612
	Zechariah	14	211	5,927
	Zephaniah	3	53	1,522
	Totals	127	2,680	75,252
	Per Day	4.54	95.71	2,687.57	17.9	Reading Minutes
	Advent (First Sunday to Christmas Eve Day)				26	days
	Book	Chapters	Verses	Words
	Isaiah	66	1,292	34,661
	Per Day	2.54	50	1,333	8.9	Reading Minutes