I am doing some research about how and when God spoke to people in the Old Testament. It has been facinating on number of levels, but one thing that has really intrigued me is the frequency and location of either “God said …” or “the Lord said …” throughout the text (based on Hebrew, not English – you can contact me if you want to know the details). Anyway … have a look at this graph (click to enlarge it):
Here are a few of my observations:
- The books are listed in order of percentage of occurences per book divided by the number words per book. So for example, in the top book, Malachi, just over 2% of the words used in the book (in Hebrew) are either “God said …” or “the Lord said …”.
- Not suprisingly, the terms tend to occur most frequently (as a percentage) in the prophetic books of the Old Testament.
- Also, the terms are used the least in wisdom literature.
What do you notice about the distribution, etc?
Leave a Reply