Church women count words in Bible spoken by women

The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman began scouring the Bible three years ago to do something that apparently had never been done: the cataloging of every word uttered by every woman in the more than 2,000-year-old holy book. Meeting in a church library, Freeman and an unlikely research team systematically pored over every Bible chapter, documenting the words on spreadsheets and inserting context and highlights. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

The results give surprise insights into the lives of women ranging from Abigail to Zipporah. Eve, for example, may be the Bible’s most well-known woman, but she utters only 74 words. Yet an unnamed “Shulamite woman” in the Song of Solomon holds forth with 1,425. The research, now compiled in a book - “Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter.” - is part of a boom in interest in women in scripture.

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Three years ago, the group started their work building on several known Bible facts: 93 women speak in the Bible. 49 have names. About 1.1 million words are quoted throughout the book. They later discovered that about 14,000 of those words were spoken by women in the Bible — at least in the English translation of the New Revised Standard Version.

Digging deeper, they learned:

• Judith, who murders an enemy general in the Book of Judith, gets the most ink with 2,689 words. She’s followed by the Shulamite woman in the Song of Solomon, with 1,425 words, and Esther, with 1,207 words.

• High-profile women don’t fare as well. Mary, the mother of Jesus, utters all of 191 words. Mary Magdalene says 61. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, gets 141.

• The Samaritan woman, who has the longest recorded conversation with Jesus in the Bible, speaks all of 151 words.

The book, designed in part to be used in Bible and women’s studies’ groups, includes not just the number of words spoken, but the precise quotes, their context and a profile of the speaker. In the process, it shows how women in scripture dealt with issues such as poverty, faith, infertility, marriage, prayer, rape and war.

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The women in the Bible are healers, teachers, evangelists, wives, mothers — as well as victims of terrible violence, said Freeman. She and the other researchers say they were surprised to find themselves so drawn into these women’s lives. They cried when they read passages, such as when a woman is gang-raped.

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