A group of church women from Minnesota have undertaken an ambitioud and unusual project to count every word spoken by women complete one of the biggest projects that involve the Holy Bible.
According to Star Tribune, the group led by Minnesota Reverend Lindsay Hardin Freeman documented and catalogued the words spoken by women in the Bible and kept track of each woman's word count.
Freeman was joined in this endeavour by three women from the Trinity Episcopal Church in Excelsior: Susan Webster, Joyce White and Christy Stang.
Freeman, a former pastor at the church, said in an interview: "We were stunned nobody had done this before."
Freeman said she had read other books on women in the Bible, but she had not encountered a book that looked specifically at the words that women in the Bible had said.
"We wanted to hold up their words, and bring them to life," the priest said.
The team has worked on their research for three years and is gaining significant ground.
Among their findings are:
- The women with the most words spoken in a single book is Judith, who had a total of 2,689 words.
- Although the most important woman in the New Testament, the mother of Jesus Christ, Mother Mary, spoke 191 words.
- The first woman, Eve, had only 74 words attributed to her in the Book of Genesis.
- Women in the Bible spoke a total of 14,000 words out of the roughly 1.1 million words in he Bible.
In addition, Star Tribune reported, the team intended the book to be an in depth approach to describing the role that women played during Biblical times, including how they dealt with issues "such as poverty, faith, infertility, marriage, prayer, rape and war."
"These are real people with real personalities," Freeman described the women in the Bible.
The rest of the group's findings have been published in a book titled "Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter."
As a second phase of the project, her team is currently developing a Jeopardy-based board game based on their findings.
