How Many Words Are There In The Bible?

Some Christians may have the following perspective on the Bible:

"A book with a lot of pages, very small text, and extremely thin paper. Content isn't very interesting, that's why we labour at it two chapters a day everyday of the year. To finish the book once would take at least, well, quite a number of days - whatever two chapters divided by the number of chapters there are in the Bible, minus the days I take off because I forget, can't be bothered, or give up reading altogether. So in the end it takes about forever to read the Bible over... once!"

That used to be my perspective a while ago. How that has changed.

The length of and the time it takes to read the Bible is no longer mystical and unfathomable after this entry has been posted. Do you know how many words there are in the Bible?

In the King James version, there are 609,269 words in the Old Testament and 179,011 words in the New Testament, for a total of 788,280 words. (Other versions will have very similar statistics)

Here's the interesting part:

According to studies (found on the Internet), books on tape are recommended to be read at about 160 words per minute, which is the range that people comfortably hear and vocalize words. Have you read an audio book before? It is quite slow.

But let's suppose you read really slow at 140 words per minute, (which is pretty much primary school reading). Let's do some maths -->
((788,280/60)/140) = 94 hours, where 60 is the number of minutes in an hour, and 140 is the number of words read in a minute.

Check your reading speed here --> http://mindbluff.com/askread.htm
You will be surprised just like I was, when I cleared a result of 365+ words/minute.

For your further information, the last book in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga, "Breaking Dawn" has a word count of 192,196, which is tens of thousands more than the New Testament. Click here to check out how fast people finished "Breaking Dawn". One particular forum user said that she finished "Breaking Dawn" in one week, but announced that it was only because school was back on. And yes these people are teenagers.

In closing, please don't get me wrong, I am not encouraging anyone to speed read the Bible. But I do believe that it is essential for people to quickly read the Bible over a few times to get a good idea of the structure, content, and central themes. After that, when a Christian has a steady base to build understanding upon, is he able to effectively study and meditate on the Word of God.

Here's a theory, and it goes like this:
[In reading the Word of God, it takes drastic commitment to read two chapters a day for two years. It is probably easier, more feasible, more achievable,** to commit to 100,000 words per day for 8 days.]

** and more satisfying