The following table comes from:
Joshua M. Sears, A
Modern Guide to an Old Testament (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2025),
77-79:
|
Books |
Percent Poetry |
|
PENTATEUCH |
2.9% |
|
Deuteronomy |
6.5% |
|
Genesis |
3.3% |
|
Numbers |
3.0% |
|
Exodus |
1.5% |
|
Leviticus |
0.1% |
|
HISTORICAL |
1.9% |
|
2 Samuel |
6.7% |
|
Judges |
5.2% |
|
Ruth |
4.5% |
|
1 Chronicles |
2.4% |
|
1 Samuel |
1.5% |
|
2 Kings |
1.2% |
|
2 Chronicles |
0.4% |
|
Joshua |
0.4% |
|
1 Kings |
0.2% |
|
Ezra |
0.2% |
|
Nehemiah |
0.0% |
|
Esther |
0.0% |
|
WISDOM/POETIC |
91.9% |
|
Lamentations |
100.0% |
|
Song of Solomon |
99.7% |
|
Proverbs |
99.6% |
|
Psalms |
97.6% |
|
Job |
90.7% |
|
Ecclesiastes |
21.5% |
|
PROPHETIC |
44.0% |
|
Obadiah |
99.4% |
|
Micah |
99.1% |
|
Zephaniah |
97.7% |
|
Habakkuk |
97.2% |
|
Nahum |
95.2% |
|
Hosea |
87.1% |
|
Amos |
85.9% |
|
Joel |
83.8% |
|
Isaiah |
80.3% |
|
Jeremiah |
36.7% |
|
Zechariah |
18.1% |
|
Jonah |
13.9% |
|
Ezekiel |
18.1% |
|
Daniel |
8.1% |
|
Haggai |
0.0% |
|
Malachi |
0.0% |
Explaining how he
arrived at these figures, Sears noted that:
. . . I took an electronic text
of the King James translation; removed chapter and verse numbers and pilcrows
(paragraph markers); and divided the words into separate documents, with all
the prose in one and poetry in the other, so that I could see word counts. I identified
words as poetry when they are presented that way in the New Revised Stand
Version Updated Edition. Although Bible translations will sometimes differ in
their discussions about which passages are poetry, there is a broad consistency,
so the NRSVue provides a representative model that would not be very different
had I picked another translation. Note that the percentage for canonical
categories is based on words of poetry in that category divided by total words
in the category, not an average of the percentages for each book in that
category. Those numbers would be different because some books have many words
while others have few. (Joshua M. Sears, A Modern Guide to an Old Testament
[Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2025], 151 n. 5)
