The hopelessly complicated and voluminous United States tax code made me wonder
just how many words are in the Bible.
United States Representative Dave Camp, the Chairman of the House (of
Representatives) Ways and Means Committee said of a watchdog agency report,
“This report confirms that the code is 10 time the size of the Bible with none
of the good news.” Estimates place
the word count of the 16,845 page document to be approximately 3,800,000. The document consisted of 11,400 words
in 1914.
The word count of the Bible depends, of course, on which language and which translation is used and how the words are counted. Should you include the names of the books or the word
“chapter”? Should you use the
Greek and Hebrew originals, which, of course, do not apparently still exist in
their autograph state? Especially
with the Greek text, there are numerous variants, which, while not changing the
meaning of the text, would cause the word count to vary.
Should you include the supercripts and postscripts to the Psalms (http://www.bombaxo.com/blog/?p=330)?
If one uses the King James version of the Bible, there may
several word counts derived based on the method used for the count. One estimate is 783,137 words. Another is 788,280, while a third is
823,156. All are far short
of 3.8 million.
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