Genesis opens on the making of the world and the first week of it, then narrows fast: a garden and a bad decision, a flood, a tower abandoned half-built at Babel. From chapter twelve it stops being about everybody and becomes the story of one family — Abraham, promised more descendants than he can count and asked to give up the son he has; then Jacob, who cheats his brother and wrestles a stranger till dawn; then Joseph, sold by his own brothers and turning up years later running Egypt. Two things to know before you start. The genealogies are real and they are long — sixty-seven rounds of who begat whom. And the last twenty chapters, once Joseph arrives, run like a novel.
Genesis is 35,983 words. At an average adult reading pace of 300 words per minute that comes to about 2 hr — roughly 1 hr 30 min if you read quickly, or 3 hr at a more deliberate 200 words a minute. The audiobook runs about three and a half hours.
Read here, one word at a time at the tempo chosen for this book, it takes 1:37:20. Word counts are measured from the complete public-domain text rather than estimated from a page count — you can compare all the books side by side.