The Hebrew Bible contains 305,417 words. Using the word references produced by the folk at STEP Bible as my definition of a unique word (strictly spealing, word meaning), there are 11,417 distinct Hebrew word meanings used in the Hebrew Bible. This means that each distinct word (meaning) is used an average of 26.75 times.
I recently met an old friend who commented that among other scriptures, he is trying to remember Psalm 23 in the Hebrew, in part so that he would recognise the words used in it when they occurred elsewhere in the Bible. This got me to thinking which book, or chapter, of the Bible would be the "best" to learn purely from the perspective of maximising the benefit for reading the rest of the Bible gained by knowing every word in that book/chapter.
My initial approach to this was to divide all Bible words into "popular" and "unpopular", where a word is "popular" if it occurs over 26 times in the Hebrew Bible. With this definition of "popular" words, there are 1399 popular words (I have listed them here for those interested).
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My first approach to using this "popular words" list, was to identify the books which might be the "easiest" to read, where "ease" is measured by the percentage of words used in the book which are "popular" by the above definition. I was slightly amused to see that Daniel appears as the most difficult book to read, as its often the book that I refer to as an example of a book that is hard to read. In reality, it probably appears as the most difficult as half of it is written in Aramaic, and thus it will contain many words which do not occur in any other book (well, except for Ezra which also contains Aramaic). By this definition of "ease of reading" the books are ranked as shown in the table to the right. Easiest chapters to readSo, with Psalm 23 still in mind, I was then interested to know which chapters were the easiest and hardest to read by this measure. I was surprised to see that in the book list to the right, Psalms appear quite near the center of the list, where my perspective is that it is one of the more difficult books to read. I have put the complete ordered chapter list here, but in summary, Psalm 23 appears in 732th place of the 929 chapters of the Bible. So Psalm 23 is a "difficult" chapter. In terms of Psalms, Psalm 23 is the 120th easiest to read,.. or to put it the other way round, the 31st hardest to read. So it may well be that the Psalms that I have attempted to read have been on the harder end of the "difficultness" list, and perhaps have skewed my perception of how hard Psalms are to read generally. According to my list Psalm 134 is the easiest Psalm to read,.. so perhaps I should head there next! |
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