And the angel said unto me. "Behold these shall dwindle in unbelief" 1 Nephi 12:22
Posted: Friday 01 December 2023 ( 5 months ago )
What is the best book in the Bible? (*)
Well, that depends on how you define "best".
One way to try to determine it, though, would be to identify all the passages in the Bible that contain ideas that you consider good, and then compare the number of good passages found in each book of the Bible.
That's easy for me to do, since I have marked as "good stuff" at the Skeptics Annotated Bible everything I can honestly call good in the Bible. (**)
Of the 66 books in the Bible (excluding the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books), 26 - the Bible's "bad books" - have nothing good.
The other 44 books have at least something good. Of those books, Proverbs has the most good stuff, with 60 good verses.
But Proverbs is a fairly large book, with 31 chapters. How would it look if we adjusted the good stuff rankings to account for the size of the books?
We can do that by computing the number of good verses per chapter. When this is done for Proverbs, we get 1.94.
The book with the second highest number of good things is Ecclesiastes, with 46. But Ecclesiastes has only 12 chapters. So the number of good verses/chapter is 3.83 - nearly twice that of Proverbs. (The overall average for the Bible is 0.29.)
But what about all the bad stuff in the Bible? Shouldn't we try to find a way to rate the goodness of a book by weighing both the book's good and bad?
The simplest solution, I think, is to count the good things in each book and subtract the bad. The result is the net good. (I totaled cruelty, injustice, intolerance, bad family values, insults to women and homosexuals to get the number of bad things, since the verses marked with these categories are all morally objectionable.)
When I did that, there were only two books with more good than bad: Ecclesiastes (of course) and James (42 and 5, respectively). Five others have a zero net goodness. The other 59 books are all more bad than good. Proverbs came in at -15, with 15 more bad things than good.
When size is taken into account the goodness of Ecclesiastes is even more pronounced. There are 46 good verses and only 4 bad, giving a net good per chapter value of 3.50. The next best (and the only other book with a value of more than zero) is James with 1.00.
(The overall average for the Bible is -3.41 net good passages per chapter.)
--------------------* In our latest podcast (#177), I said that Ecclesiastes was the best book in the Bible. Here is my reasoning for that.
** In the SAB, I identify the Bible's verses that contain good advice about how we should live our lives, whatever our religious views might be. For example, I think it's a good idea to try, at least as much as possible, to treat others kindly. So I include Leviticus 19:18 ("Love thy neighbor as thyself") in the "Good Stuff". Of course, not all the verses that I've marked good are as good as this verse, but I marked them good because they seemed (at least somewhat) good to me.
So take a look at the SAB's good stuff to see if you agree, at least most of the time, that the verses that I've marked good are, in fact, good. If so, then the following analysis should be reasonable for you as well.
