X-Dreamers · Lab sheet

Bible Word Usage

Charts of where key words such as love, grace, law and faith appear across the 66 books, in English, Chinese, Hebrew and Greek, with a search for any word.

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The gallery of key words, each with a strip of counts across the 66 books

Where each word falls across the 66 books

Key facts

Each chart is one bar per book, in canonical order, so you can see at a glance where a word gathers.
Switch the text between the KJV, the 1919 Chinese Union Version and the Hebrew and Greek, and the answer can change.
In English, “faith” is most frequent in Romans; in Greek the faith words are most frequent in John, mostly the verb “believe”.
Search any English word (add * for every form), a Chinese word, or a Hebrew or Greek lemma, also by Strong's number such as H157 or G26.
Switch between raw counts and a rate per 1,000 words, so a short letter is not drowned out by a long book.
In class: ask the group to guess where a word is most common before you show the chart.

Key verses

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
1 John 4:8 · King James Version

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Ephesians 2:8 · King James Version

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.
Romans 1:17 · King James Version

Talk about it

Where did you expect the word to be most common, and what surprised you?
In the KJV John never says “faith” but often says “believe”. Does that change how you read his Gospel?
A count shows where a word appears, not what it means. What else do we need to read well?

How sure can we be?

The Bible says

Counts are taken from the texts themselves: the KJV, the 1919 Chinese Union Version and the tagged Hebrew and Greek.
Each chart lists the forms, characters or lemmas it counts.

Our reconstruction

Which forms count as “the same word” is a choice; each count belongs to its text, not to the Bible in general.
Chinese has no spaces, so a character is also counted inside longer words.

Still debated

Translators render one Hebrew or Greek word in several ways, so counts in different Bibles differ.