How long does it take to read the Bible?

The King James Bible is 783,137 words and takes about 55 hours to read silently — a little over two days. Read aloud at 183 words per minute it takes about 71 hours, which matches the long-quoted "70 hours 40 minutes at pulpit rate" figure closely enough to corroborate it. The Old Testament is more than three times the New: 602,587 words against 180,550. A common one-year reading plan works out at about nine minutes a day.

The numbers

Total

2 days 6 hours

In hours

54.8 hours

Non-stop

2.3 days without sleeping

Covers

783,137 words in the King James Version

At a realistic pace

a chapter a day

That works out as

about 366 days

What this assumes

783,137 words at 238 words per minute for silent reading. The King James Version without the Apocrypha; including it the total is nearer 788,000 words. Other translations differ by several percent.

Broken down

The frequently quoted 70 hours 40 minutes read-aloud figure traces to Roy Zuck's Speaker's Quote Book (1997) and is a homiletics estimate, not a measurement. It agrees closely with the arithmetic at 183 words per minute.

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