Numbers 29 Repeats Itself Most in Chinese
Answering: “most repetitive chapter in the Bible”
Updated 2026-09-26 · plain text · JSON
Repetition is measured as tokens divided by types — how many times the average word in a chapter gets used. A chapter at 1.5 introduces something new almost every word; a chapter at 8.29, like Numbers 29, says the same things over and over. Chapters under 100 words are excluded, because a short chapter's ratio is noise.
The top of the list is ritual and administrative text: Numbers 29 (8.29×), Numbers 7 (8.25×), Leviticus 13 (6.8×) — offering schedules, census records and priestly instructions, where a formula repeats with one number changed. That makes them dull to read and unusually easy to *read in Chinese*: after the first few verses the vocabulary stops arriving.
At the other end, Jeremiah 47 runs at 1.41×, with 109 distinct words in 154 — dense poetry, where almost nothing repeats. The Bible's average is 55.4 occurrences per word across the whole text, but that number hides exactly this variation between chapters.
| Chapter | Word tokens | Distinct words | Uses per word |
|---|---|---|---|
| Numbers 29 | 962 | 116 | 8.29 |
| Numbers 7 | 1,955 | 237 | 8.25 |
| Leviticus 13 | 1,483 | 218 | 6.8 |
| Numbers 28 | 684 | 135 | 5.07 |
| Joshua 21 | 1,093 | 226 | 4.84 |
| Jeremiah 47 | 154 | 109 | 1.41 |
| Psalms 14 | 118 | 83 | 1.42 |
| Psalms 58 | 186 | 130 | 1.43 |
| Psalms 53 | 120 | 84 | 1.43 |
| Psalms 11 | 109 | 76 | 1.43 |
Chapters under 100 word tokens are excluded; the first five rows are the most repetitive, the last five the least.
Questions
- Is a repetitive chapter a good place to start reading?
- For practice, yes — the vocabulary load is front-loaded. For interest, less so, which is why the easiest-chapters list ranks by HSK vocabulary instead.
- Why exclude short chapters?
- Because a 40-word chapter cannot repeat much by construction, so its ratio measures its length rather than its style.
- What counts as a word here?
- A segmented token: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation).
Related reference pages
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-26, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).