I love the Bible. I love studying it, digging into the history, chasing down the cultural details and occasionally falling into a rabbit hole so deep that I look up three hours later and wonder how I got there.
Apparently, I am not the first person to do this. In 1718, some unnamed gentleman, we’ll call Mr. No Name, apparently took Bible study to a level I can only admire from a safe distance.
He counted things, a lot of things. According to an old Bible reference work, this gentleman spent three years investigating the Bible's statistics; counting books, chapters, verses, words and letters. The resulting figures included 31,173 verses, 773,692 words and 3,566,480 letters in the Bible.
There is something wonderfully amusing about imagining this man's life.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Counting Bible letters.”
“For fun?”
“For three years.”
“Umm. . .OK.”
Here's where my Bible-nerd brain gets even more interested though, counting the words and letters of Scripture wasn't some bizarre 18th-century hobby invented by one particularly determined man…. READ MORE…
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