B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?

Dustin Curlee

Dear Dustin:

I waited for a week to answer this, as I don’t think it’s possible that such a work exists, but I wanted to wait until someone proved me wrong.

seekinganswers wrote:Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?

Dustin Curlee

Because there’s no one to one correspondence between Hebrew words and English words, every translation will be different. Every dictionary will be different. So how can a word count be made?

Karl W. Randolph.

seekinganswers wrote:Afternoon,

Does anyone know if someone has put in the work to find out the word count of Hebrew to English words in the book of Genesis?

The Masoretic Text in my database has 20,704 words in Genesis. The Holman Study Bible has 34,022 words in Genesis. The RSV has 36,520. The NIV 35,219.

In my opinion, it would be hard to extrapolate something from that data.