Hi, I have been struggling to find an actual answer to how I would go about memorising the Bible, specifically memorising verses. I have read some introductory ideas to memorisation but I am really struggling to find and pick the particular methods to go about memorising Bible verses. My main intention is to learn a method to storing Bible verses verbatim and slowly adding to a library of verses I can call on during conversation and times of self-reflection, not memorising entire books of the Bible. Which method should I use? Are there maybe some smaller projects I should start with?
Also for clarification, I have tried reading through other posts about how to do it on here and did not find them helpful, as they were rather disorganised and a bit hard for me to understand since I am new. Thanks!
I’m maybe not the best person to answer that because I’m not doing verbatim memory or at least I’m not obsessing over it, since I think a filler word wrong here and there don’t matter as soon as you don’t change the meaning of a verse – unless you’re learning in the original greek/hebrew text of course.
But I would encourage you to go for memorizing the outlines of books (1-3 main ideas per chapter, ideally in a memory palace), and then fill it out with the verses you want to learn verbatim. (Or at the very least reading the entire books, instead of only “extracts”, even if you learn only passages from them later).
You can do that relatively quickly (there are several versions of the Bible that already gives you the titles/subheadings) if you have a memory palace available (or just go and do it “on site”). What helped me A LOT was to have a PAO system (well only the people really), ready to “play out” the scenes in each chapter, that way it’s extremely easy to remember in which chapter is what.
- It really helps because the verses are “put away” somewhere and ordered logically instead of “floating free” in your mind. Understanding is making connexions between things and have things well-ordered helps a lot.
- to understand the context of verses really helps to understand them. (Incidentally, so much harm has been done and is being done by people sadly “bludgeoning” each other with verses taken out of context). Maybe it’s a professional quirk because I’m a translator but context truly is everything.
As for verbatim itself, I found the grid one of the most useful methods (I don’t remember if I got the idea from Ron White or Ronald Johnson first). But there are litterally dozen of different ways to memorize, and you’ll have to try things out and find what you like best.
I can only recommend the podcast “bible memory goal” (I think there is a YT channel as well) : over the years the author has interviewed tons of people who all use different techniques to learn different things and I like to hear about all the different ideas and methods (even if I don’t use them myself).
It’s hard to tell more as long as you don’t have a concrete problem/example…
Awesome, that is a few great places I can start. If it helps to clarify, I find it important to remember verse numbers associated with the particular verse that I am using. In everyday conversation, I’ll be having a discussion with someone and try to explain a theological principle. I’ll try to quote a verse and butcher it, only relaly remembering the essence of the verse and also never being able to remember what book its from or where in the book it is (the verse and chapter). I agree that verbatim memory isn’t entirely necessary and one or two words wrong isn’t super bad, but to me the importance of verbatim memorisation is the fact that this is the written word of God and it was written the way it was for a reason.
Also completely agree that context really matters with Bible verses for exactly the same reason, I hate when people take verses out of context.
@BFHOOVEY, I admire your drive to memorize scripture. That was a desire of my heart about five years ago and led me to this forum and beyond.
Memorizing the Bible is not like picking a few entries out of a database to remember. I see it more as a grove of trees with several different types but in the same location. The scriptures are like leaves and trying to remember individual leaves on many different trees poses a big challenge. I’ve collected most of the Bible memorization books that have been published and found that they all, except for one, rely on a natural ability to remember after repeating a verse multiple times. I don’t have that strong of a natural memory so I use mnemonic techniques.
I participate in the Bible Memory Goal forum but actually, I think I’ve found better advice and ideas here on this forum. Although, I haven’t listened to all the poscasts but almost everything I’ve seen there is about brute force memory work. Ronald Johnson (@RonaldJohnson) has a good podcast and is interested in Bible memorization also.
@Hari-P has a good strategy in my mind. I used the title/subheading to form a foundation for random scriptures I heard or wanted to remember. St. Augustine thought it not that important to memorize verbatim but to have the themes memorized. So, I put together a large “memory palace” that is the image of the large grove of trees to me. You can find my published work and that of all the other published authors from this forum on the good books page.
My 7711 system works for me but I think that people need to decide for themselves what they need. I was able to keep about 100 scriptures in my head without a foundation. But they needed constant review. Now, committing the NT themes to memory and adding scriptures is my goal after coming through some health issues that afffected my memory short-term. Putting together a well-designed and consistent system for just the NT was very difficult. I haven’t seen any other complete examples out there.
If I can help out with questions on Bible memorization, I’d be happy to help. I use a patchwork of different techniques for verbatim scriptures.
Doug
I made a post a while ago about verbatim memorization. You may like it:
I’d recommend the former two methods that I mentioned there.
For your goal in particular, I recommend also having a 2-digit PAO to remember the number of the verses. There are many resources online teaching it. If you try to build such system, my own PO list may help you:
For each verse, create a mental image associating the verse number (being represented by your PAO images) and the content of the verse.
In order to review, I recommend creating flashcards on Anki, which is a spaced repetition software. In the note type, choose “Basic (and reversed card).” In the front of the card, put the verse number. In the back, put the text itself. Two cards will be generated automatically:
- The one that shows the verse and asks for the text
- The one that shows the text and asks for the verse
When seeing the former, try to recite the text from memory. When seeing the latter, try to recall the verse number.
I hope that helps.
I did come across your post about the 7711 system and didn’t understand it quite at first. However, after actually looking through the comments you go into much greater detail about some fo the points I was confused about. Thanks! I will give it a good read
The 2-digit PAO method is probably going to be the best way to memorise verse numbers, I agree. I wasn’t too fussed about the John Place method, I feel like what I am trying to aim for is more of a consistent and precise approach to memorising scripture rather than a slighlty more sophisticated rote approach (although I do agree it makes a lot of sense to do it that way). Thank you for your help, I will need to look into the Initials Link Method you talk about. Do you have any resources that properly explain it?
Only the resources that I quoted in that message. I’ve never seen it mentioned in books, for instance. However, the method is so simple that you don’t need that anyways.
In this case, I think it may be worth it to use a memory palace to encode the core ideas of each verse as well, like one image per verse. This would make the recall easier. However, repetition would still have a big role.
There are methods of memorizing texts verbatim that don’t resemble rote repetition (like the third one I mentioned there, but I’ve found them too hard). Imo, texts are meaningful enough to the point that creating an image for every word isn’t worth it, so these sophisticated rote methods can be quite efficient.
I need to admit that I haven’t read Doug’s method, so maybe it’ll change my mind, who knows.
In my first book of techniques, I list the verbatim techniques of
- the initial letters of each word that I call word-for-word acronym and techniques for trying to memorize the resulting gibberish,
- using important words and relying on natural memory to fill in the rest that I call keyword substitute words
- and various grid techniques.
And I agree with you, that creating an image for every word is a bad idea. In fact, one of the earliest books on memory thinks its a bad idea also.
Personally, I use substitute words unless there is a sequence of important words which then I also use the acronym style.
Doug
Is this what I had called the Initials link method? Or is it something different? Because the one I mentioned does make use of the initial letters, but they aren’t memorized as an acronym. They are simply used to strengthen our memory of the text through active recall.
That is also what I’m thinking of using in the long term. I was using the John Place method, which works well, but that is only because I wasn’t worried about having all the text memorized sequentially. They were just a bunch of disconnected fragments. If I were to memorize multiple paragraphs in order, like a book, then I’d probably use substitute words together with the Initials Link Method.
Thanks for explaining your method, Doug!
Yes, it’s the same but not a complete mnemonic technique because it relies on your natural memory to recall the inital letters on the page. That’s what I called gibberish. I love Nelson Dellis but he has a good natural memory so he can stop at that point and make it work. I can’t. I need something to remember the letter sequence.
A psychology study found that acronyms don’t scale well, in otherwords, the more letters you have, the worse it gets as a technique to deal with. Most likely it’s because the almost random letters poses a challenge to create something visual.
In my book, I categorize several different types of acronyms, one that we are challenged with here is the Requires Work acronym and sometimes the Simple Nonsense acronym. They vary based on how easily you can embellish the letters to make up something of a visual image. Another non-acrostic method is to create a new sentence using the first letters of the target phrase with different words which I call Word Substitution by First Letter.
I had to find some solutions to coming up to speed with Nelson! But he’s still way better at this than I am.
Doug
To be honest my “system” is not entirely defined because at this point I’ve mostly been testing different methods and trying new things, so each book I memorized (or began memorizing) uses a slightly different method.
Another thing I did and found helpful (other than memory palaces and a PAO system) is to think in advance of concrete objects for abstract concepts: grace, faith/believe, communion, peace, the world, sin, etc. Not only it helps because you don’t have to think to encode when you get an abstract concept (and it’s quicker to decode too), but if it’s coherent in your system across all books you’ll avoid mix ups.
I didn’t think it required us to recall the initial letters. I mean, I thought the goal was to recall the text itself, not the letters. All letters, except the initials, are occluded in order to force us to recall the text in a way that exerts effort but not too much. The initials aren’t supposed to be remembered. Because of that, I don’t think it works in the same way as acronyms, nor do the objections to acronyms apply to this method.
For instance, I applied the Initial Link Method to a presentation I needed to make. After a few repetitions, I had the text memorized, but I couldn’t recall the initials by themselves. In fact, I didn’t even feel like I knew the text itself. What happened was that, given the initial trigger (first sentence), I could recite the whole text naturally, without thinking. It felt like an implicit type of memory, tbh.
Also, maybe you’ll find this post interesting:
It uses the John Place method together with images for each page, so it isn’t just a more sophisticated rote memorization, I guess.
The word of God is inspired. Translations are not (or at least not in the same way).
Maybe it’s because I find very useful (and enjoyable) to read lots of different translations, but my trouble is that I can’t choose which one I want to learn now. Basically my idea is to learn a version that is easily understandable by the people I speak with on a daily basis. But reading an entire chapter, sometimes I find one translation is best for one verse, and another one best or more clear for the next verse (a sort of analysis paralysis).
Adding to this that I live in a bilingual environment which means it would make sense to learn everything both in French and German (or if I choose one, which one? more indecision)… All of this to say that I’ve not memorized as much as I intended to (especially longer passages), which is disappointing – although I’m very happy with the “outline memorizing” I’ve done.
Yeah, I had this problem, too, and eventually went and bit the bullet and started to learn it in Hebrew. Wish I could brag about how efficient it was or whatever, but it’s not. I’ve got one station for each word, and it’s word is a huge drag because it’s in a foreign language with few cognate that I don’t know that well, but it’s ultimately what I had to do to eliminate doubt about translations.
I began with Hebrew last year, but because I want to know what people are talking about when they tell me “but this verse means this because in the original this and that”, not because I want to learn the text itself verbatim.
Although it does solve the problem of which version to choose, I feel it wouldn’t solve the problem entirely for me, because since I’m from another time and culture, there no chance of me understanding it like the person reading it at the time did, even presuming I learnt Hebrew well enough to be able to without it being excruciatingly inefficient. So no Hebrew/Greek verbatim for me… I’m vaguely considering it for the psalms because it’s poetic so even more gets lost in translation… but that’s still a long way off given how I’m progressing in the language.
I guess I’ll just have to choose one version in my native language for each passage that interests me and accept that it’s not going to be perfect.