Heaps

In the third month they began to lay the foundation of the heaps, and finished them in the seventh month.

This verse, 2 Chronicles 31:7, is the 30638th most popular verse in the Bible out of the 31101 verses that make up the Bible. This is according to TopVerses.com, a site that ranks all of the verses in the Bible in order of the number of times they appear on the internet.

I am hoping that by posting about 2 Chronicles 31:7 it might be possible to push it up the rankings a bit. To my mind it is quite an informative verse, telling us as it does:

• Building heaps is a good thing to do.
• A good heap should always start with a foundation.
• It can take up to about four months to build a decent heap.
• ‘They’ built the heaps. Building heaps isn’t a one man job.
• You need to finish your heaps. There’s nothing worse than an unfinished heap.

Of course it is not a verse without controversy. The preceding verse (slightly more popular – ranked 28320) seems to suggest that cattle and sheep were included in the heaps. Whether they were alive or dead we don’t know.

Top verses is a very interesting site – and thanks to Inspire for alerting me to it. As well as the top verses it includes the top 10 books, the top ten chapters, the top verses in each book and the top verses containing particular words.

The failing, of course, is that one could be led to believe that the verses most often published on the internet are therefore the most important verses. My own view is that the most important themes in the Bible come not from picking individual ‘soundbite’ verses out of context, but by looking at the overall message of entire books. Surely that is how it was intended to be read.

Feel free to post your own devotional thoughts on 2 Chronicles 31:7. It would be great if we could bump it up to the top 5. This would perplex a lot of people, which I’m all in favour of.