How Long Does It Take to Write the Bible by Hand? Finish-Date Calculator

Short answer: writing out the whole Bible by hand takes roughly 500 to 900 hours. Spread over a year, that is about one and a half to two and a half hours a day. The New Testament alone takes about 120 to 200 hours.

Here is where those numbers come from, and how to plan it.

Work out your own finish date

Choose what you want to write and how many verses a day. The time estimate assumes 15 to 25 words a minute, using King James Version word counts.

How long is the Bible?

• 31,102 verses in the Protestant Bible, in 1,189 chapters.
• About 780,000 words in the King James Version. Modern translations are similar in length.
• The New Testament is 7,957 verses and about 180,000 words. Psalms is 2,461 verses.

How many hours to handwrite the whole Bible?

Most adults copy text by hand at somewhere around 15 to 25 words a minute. At that pace, 780,000 words takes roughly 500 to 900 hours of writing. Your own speed depends on your handwriting, your pen and how often you stop to think.

How long to handwrite the New Testament?

At the same pace, the New Testament’s 180,000 or so words take about 120 to 200 hours. That is around 20 to 35 minutes a day for a year, or a little over an hour a day for six months. It is a good first project if the whole Bible feels like too much.

What a one-year plan looks like

• The whole Bible in a year: about 85 verses a day, roughly one and a half to two and a half hours.
• The New Testament in a year: about 22 verses a day, around half an hour.
• Psalms in a year: about 7 verses a day, five to ten minutes.

How long did it take scribes to copy the Bible?

Before printing, every Bible was copied by hand. For a scribe, a complete Bible was a project of many months, and often a year or more, depending on the size of the book, the script and how much decoration it carried. That is one reason hand-copied Bibles were rare and costly, and why the printed Gutenberg Bible of the 1450s changed so much.

Start smaller than you think

If you are new to scripture writing, begin with one book, or a short plan of a few verses a day, and let the habit grow. A free lined writing page is ready to print.

If one book still feels like a lot, the November scripture writing plan gives you one verse a day, and the SOAP method adds a short reflection after you write. For a first day, the shortest verse in the Bible is two words long.

Penned Grace lets you write on iPhone, iPad or Android with Apple Pencil or your finger, a few verses at a time, and keeps a calendar of every day you wrote.