February 20, 2015
There’s a new book by Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman, an Episcopal priest, written to answer the question, “How many words are spoken by women in the Bible?”
This book has initiated a lot of social media attention.
“There are 93 women who speak in the Bible, 49 of whom are named. These women speak a total of 14,056 words collectively — roughly 1.1 percent of the total words in the holy book.”
Read an article on Huffington Post Religion about the book and the process of creating it.
To be fair, words spoken by women characters in the Bible should be measured as a percentage against words spoken by men characters. Most of the words in the entirety of the biblical text do not proceed from the mouth of any specific character, male or female. Therefore, measuring the words spoken by female personae against ALL words found in the Bible can be misleading. For example, the article referenced by this link states that “roughly 1.1 percent of the total words” in the Bible come from the mouths of women. On the surface, one might assume that the remaining 98.9 percent of words came from the mouths of men, but that is simply not the case.