Back in 2017, I read the Bible twice. The first time, I did it as a speed-run challenge – I got it done in 73 days. I took the rest of the year completing the second read.
I read the New King James Version for the first time, then switched to The Message for the second time, though I couldn’t handle it and switched to the New International Version about halfway through.
During this process, I got interested in word counts, primarily to keep up my motivation. I felt like I needed to know my progress and context, to stay motivated to get it done. So I compiled the below from a list of counts in the King James version (I figured this was canonical-ish), then did some math.
This was originally in a spreadsheet, but since the counts aren’t likely to change, I’ve flattened them here to a table.
Here’s a key to the columns.
- Name: The name of the book
- Testament: The testament the book is in: [O]ld or [N]ew
- Words: The word count of that book
- Percent: The percent of total words that particular book – in isolation – comprises
- Cum(ulative) Words: The cumulative words through the end of this book – if you read through this book, what total number of words would you have read?
- Cum(ulative) Percent: The cumulative percent of words through the end of this book – if you read through this book, what percent of total words would you have read?
- Rank: The order of this book by length, from longest to shortest (i.e. – “1” is the longest book, “2” is the next longest, etc.)
A few observations which I found interesting.
- The Torah, or the first five books of the Bible, are fully one-fifth of the total length
- The Old Testament is 75% of the Bible
- The Old Testament and the four Gospels are almost 90% of the Bible
- The books of the Old Testament are about 2.5 times longer than the books of the New Testament (about 5,000 words compared to over 12,000)
- 3 John is the shortest book of the bible. At 219 words, it’s basically a long paragraph.