Counting a phrase across the King James Bible — and why "fear not" is not 365 times

You have probably seen the claim. It circulates in sermons, devotionals, and
wall art: "The Bible says 'fear not' 365 times — one for every day of the year."

I wanted to know if it was true. That turned into a small data-engineering
problem, and the answer is a useful example of how a plausible number survives
because nobody checks it.

The short answer

Counted against the King James Version with a stated, reproducible rule:

Rule	Verses
Exact phrase fear not	62
Exact phrase + common inflections (fear not, feared not, fearing not)	70
fear in any form	400 occurrences in 385 verses

Not 365. Not close. The popular figure has no documented source — it does not
appear in a concordance, and the "365" was likely chosen because a year has 365
days, not because anyone counted.

Why this is a counting problem, not a trivia problem

Three things make naive counting wrong, and they are the same three things that
make any text-analysis pipeline wrong:

1. Define the unit. A verse is the KJV's own versification. An
occurrence is a substring match. "400 occurrences in 385 verses" and "62
verses" are answering different questions, and both are correct. Most disputes
about counts are really disputes about the unit.

2. Inflection. English "fear not" is a fixed phrase, but the underlying
verb inflects: feared not, fearing not, fear thou not. A regex on the
exact string undercounts. And there is no clean place to stop — every added
variant is a judgment call you have to write down.

3. Translation. The KJV and the Chinese Union Version (和合本) do not agree,
because they are not literal mappings of one another. 和合本 uses four separate
不要 constructions. Counting one and reporting it as "the Bible" is a category
error.

The rule I used

Be explicit, and let a reader reproduce it:

• Corpus: KJV (public domain), verse-indexed.
• Normalize: uppercase, collapse whitespace, strip punctuation except apostrophes (so fear not and fear not. match, but fearn't is not invented by over-eager stripping).
• Match on word boundaries, not substrings — otherwise fear matches fearful, God-fearing, and fearfulness, which inflates the count by roughly 15%.
• Report verses for phrase claims, occurrences for word claims.
• Publish the matched verse list, not just the total. A count you cannot audit is not a result.

The full rule and the matched verses are in the dataset (below), one row per
matched verse, so you can diff my work rather than trust it.

The dataset

CC-BY-4.0 — reuse it, including commercially, with attribution:

• CSV: https://trustbible.org/data/fear-not-counts.csv
• JSON: https://trustbible.org/data/fear-not-counts.json
• Written-up methodology: https://trustbible.org/blog/how-many-times-does-the-bible-say-fear-not/

Columns are reference, book, chapter, verse, text, matched_phrase, rule — the
rule column is what makes it auditable, because it tells you why each row is
in the file.

What I took away

If you publish a number, publish the rule that produced it. A count with a
stated rule can be checked, corrected, and cited. A count without one is a
rumor with a decimal point.

If you find an error in mine, I would genuinely like to know — that is the
point of putting the method on the page next to the result.

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I built the counting pipeline behind this while working on
TrustBible, a Bible Q&A tool that quotes the exact
verses it cites. The counts above are independent of the app; the dataset is
the deliverable.