Word Counts of Classical Jewish Works: A Deep Dive

Comments on Individual Works; Word Count tables - Tanakh; Chazal (Mishnah; Talmud); Mishneh Torah; Tur; Shulchan Aruch

Update: See my subsequent research at my Academia.edu page: “Words of Wisdom: Word Counts of Classical Jewish Works“; and “Bavli By the Numbers: Word Counts of All Chapters in Talmud Bavli”

In an era dominated by digital advances, it’s surprising that, as far as I’m aware, a straightforward word count of classic Hebrew books isn't readily accessible to the public. 

Ari Z. Zivotofsky, “The Longest Masechta is …”, The Seforim Blog (March 31, 2023) mentions that Bar-Ilan Responsa Project (=BIRP) CD shows word counts for works contained in that corpus. YD was kind enough to send me screenshot of BIRP’s word counts (via the ‘Ask the Beit Midrash’ Facebook group, a private group).

I hope to independently check the numbers by checking Sefaria texts (see my discussion at the end of this post), as well as Academy of the Hebrew Language’s Ma’agarim (מאגרים),¹ and to document in a future post.

Comments on Individual Works

• Tanakh: See this Hebrew Wikipedia entry, which discusses the 1500 year history of attempts to get the exact word count of the Pentateuch, starting from the Talmud: סטטיסטיקות של התנ"ך – ויקיפדיה . It’s noteworthy that each book of the Pentateuch approximates the size of an ancient 'book' or scroll (=~40,000 words). The ancient 'book' or scroll is roughly equivalent to 30-40 pages in a contemporary book with standard formatting.

• Talmud: There have been a few discussions of the Babylonian Talmud's word count— with estimates around 1.865 million words. See here: Shalom, “What is the longest masechta?” (~2010), Mi Yodeya (Aug 26, 2010) ; Jeremy Brown, “Berachot 2 ~ How Many Words Are In the Babylonian Talmud?”, Talmudology (January 5, 2020); and Zivotofsky, ibid.

• I haven’t found online the Mishnah's word counts of Mishnah, Classic Midrash (midrashei halacha and aggada from period of chazal), Mishneh Torah, Zohar, Tur, and Shulchan Aruch.

• Interestingly, Zivotofsky there mentions one-volume editions of Bavli and Yerushalmi, edited by Zvi Preisler. (In my Seforim Blog post, I mistakenly cited this from a commenter on Zivitofsky’s post, instead of from Zivitofsky himself.)

• Zohar: A question on the Judaism Stack Exchange from four years ago (see here) inquiring about the Zohar's word count remains unanswered.

Word Count tables

Tanakh

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OCR text:

Work Word Count Letter Count

------------------- ------------ --------------

תנ"ך 1,202,969 306,755

בראשית 78,133 20,628

שמות 63,592 16,726

ויקרא 44,807 11,955

במדבר 63,573 16,417

דברים 54,948 14,306

יהושע 39,878 10,063

שופטים 39,044 9,906

שמואל א 51,714 13,336

שמואל ב 42,588 11,129

מלכים א 50,838 13,186

מלכים ב 48,162 12,352

ישעיהו 67,119 16,986

ירמיהו 85,571 21,975

יחזקאל 75,208 18,871

הושע 9,412 2,387

יואל 3,876 958

עמוס 8,049 2,045

עובדיה 1,124 292

יונה 2,700 688

מיכה 5,586 1,400

נחום 2,272 562

חבקוק 2,603 672

צפניה 3,005 769

חגי 2,342 601

זכריה 12,464 3,134

מלאכי 3,450 876

תהלים 79,155 19,656

משלי 26,818 6,984

איוב 32,118 8,395

שיר השירים 5,167 1,254

רות 5,002 1,306

איכה 6,084 1,564

קהלת 11,014 2,998

אסתר 12,196 3,058

דניאל 24,870 6,049

עזרא 15,950 3,791

נחמיה 22,632 5,336

דברי הימים א 44,769 10,789

דברי הימים ב 55,136 13,355

Chazal

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Work Word Count Letter Count

ספרות חז"ל 39,210,393 9,993,109

משנה 781,068 191,563

תוספתא 1,213,882 302,847

תלמוד בבלי nסכתות קטנות 7,948,735 2,004,215

תלמוד ירושלמי (וילנא) 3,133,340 794,835

תלמוד ירושלמי (ונציה) 3,206,396 814,642

מדרשי הלכה 2,201,420 576,633

מדרשי אגדה 20,725,552 5,308,374

Zohar

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Work Word Count Letter Count

זוהר 5,183,545 1,239,420

זוהר - הקדמה 58,819 14,264

זוהר 2,869,377 691,909

זוהר - תוספתא 15,908 3,699

זוהר - סתרי תורה 48,632 11,440

זוהר - מדרש הנעלם 58,764 14,449

זוהר - רעיא מהימנא 330,025 78,214

זוהר - רזא דרזין 12,171 2,772

זוהר - ס"א 1,571 396

זוהר - ספרא דצניעותא 11,168 2,642

זוהר - האדרא רבא 77,087 17,773

זוהר - האדרא זוטא 42,041 9,721

זוהר - השמטות 87,865 21,387

Mishneh Torah; Tur; Shulchan Aruch

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Work Word Count Letter Count

משנה תורה לרמב"ם (עם ראב"ד) 3,530,053 871,871

טור 2,878,992 707,401

שולחן ערוך 3,050,105 756,198

Preliminary discussion of Word counts using Wikisource and Sefaria

Wikisource, one of the primary open-access sources of the Talmud, primarily showcases text per daf or chapter, rather than per tractate. For a comprehensive approach, I turned to Sefaria's BSON dump — (BSON is a binary format used by MongoDB).

To extract the desired data, I employed Python within Google Colab. This enabled me to navigate the BSON files, particularly interacting with the ‘pymongo’ library to filter and process the Hebrew texts. This Python script also eliminates nikkud, and then counts the words.

I hope to make the final full Python to fetch these word counts, and discuss in a future post.

1. Thanks to JH in the above-mentionoed Facebook group for pointing out that Ma’agarim shows word counts