Four Words, Start to Finish
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Four Hebrew words flow as one river through every chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The thicker the river, the more often the words stand in that stretch. Each word is its own colour.
- torah: law
- berit: covenant
- chesed: kindness
- shalom: peace
Oh give thanks unto Jehovah; for he is good; For his lovingkindness endureth for ever.Psalm 136:1. The word lovingkindness here is chesed (ASV)
How this picture was made
The text
The Leningrad Codex, from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, with every word tagged with its dictionary entry. Each word's meaning was checked against the Open Scriptures Hebrew dictionary, so no word is named from memory.
What was counted
torah (law, teaching) 219 times. berit (covenant) 284. chesed (kindness, often printed lovingkindness) 247. shalom (peace) 237. All counted in each of the 929 chapters.
How it was drawn
Chapters run left to right in Tanakh order. Thickness is on a true scale: every use adds the same width. Each chapter's count is spread a little over its neighbours so the river flows, but every word's total stays exact. That smoothing lowers the sharpest single-chapter peaks.
What it shows
- Psalm 119 holds torah 25 times. Psalm 136 holds chesed 26 times, once in every verse.
- berit gathers in the Torah, most in Genesis 17 (13 times). shalom runs strongest through the Prophets (157 of 237). chesed belongs mostly to the Writings (173 of 247).
- 518 chapters hold none of the four words.
What it does not show
A word can mean different things in different places. The river counts where the word stands, not what it means there.