Words Found Only Once
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Each bar is one book of the Hebrew Bible, as long as its words. Each spark is a word that stands in that one place and nowhere else in the whole Hebrew Bible.
- Torah
- Prophets
- Writings
- a word found only once
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.Proverbs 25:2 (ASV)
How this picture was made
The text
The Leningrad Codex, from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, where every word is tagged with its dictionary entry.
What was counted
A dictionary entry that stands in exactly one place in the written text. The small joined parts of a word (such as "and" or "the") are not counted. Names used once are not sparks, since a man named once is not a rare word. They are counted apart: 1,120 names.
How it was drawn
Bars are in Tanakh order and drawn to one scale, so a longer bar is a longer book.
What it shows
- 9,504 dictionary entries are used. 2,135 words stand only once.
- Sparks per 1,000 words: Torah 3.9, Prophets 6.2, Writings 11.4.
- The thickest books are Song of Songs (35.2 per 1,000 words), Daniel (32.8), Nahum (28.7), Habakkuk (25.3), Ezra (23.7) and Job (22.2). Isaiah has the most sparks of any book (271).
- 252 of the sparks are Aramaic words. Aramaic has its own dictionary entries and is a small part of the text, which is one reason Daniel and Ezra shine.
What it does not show
Scholars usually count rare words by their root, and that count is lower. This picture uses the tags in the text, which split some words into separate entries.