Behold

Over the last few nights, we've made it through Samuel the Lamanite's famous speach in chapters 13, 14 and 15 of Helaman.  There are some things that are easier to behold when you're reading out loud, and boy, did I behold one.  Behold, it was very apparent, at there is a certain word that Samuel likes to use repeatedly.  It felt like in nearly every verse, behold, there it was.  So, let's all pull out our calculator watches, do some quick math and behold whether I'm right, or just beholding a mirage.

I pulled out Samuel's full speech, which consists of 3711 words.  He uses "behold" 53 times, or once every 70.0 words.

The internet tells me that the Book of Mormon has 268,163 words in it.  Or 267,332.  Or 270745.  It seems the internet isn't quite sure, but it doesn't really matter.  Sticking with that first number, I'll take out the 3711 words that are Samuel speaking for 264,452 non-Samuel words.  scriptures.lds.org says that there are 1499 instances of "behold" in the Book of Mormon, so once we take out Samuel's 53 uses, there are 1446 left to go around.  The math reveals that this is once every 182.9 words.

Divide those two numbers, and we behold that Samuel is using the word "behold" at a rate 2.6 times that of the rest of the Book of Mormon as a whole. Lo and be - well look at that.