Explore book lengths, chapters and verses, using the King James Version as the reference edition. Compare selected Jewish and Christian collections and see how counts vary across translations.
Jewish and Christian collections share many writings, but differ in canon, textual tradition and interpretation. These examples use editions available on this site; they do not represent every form of each tradition's Bible. The Tanakh is the complete Jewish scriptural collection, not a Bible with a missing New Testament. Counts measure the selected texts, not a tradition's importance or a translation's quality.
Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim: the Hebrew Bible in three parts, counted as 24 books because Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah are one book each and the twelve prophets are read as one. It closes with Chronicles.
Measured in the JPS TaNaKH 1917.
Its shelves ›The same books as the Tanakh, read as the Old Testament in 39 books arranged by kind, and the 27 of the New Testament. The count most English Bibles carry, and the reference for the rest of this page.
Measured in the King James Version.
Its shelves ›The Catholic Old Testament includes 7 deuterocanonical books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees, with the longer Greek forms of Esther and Daniel.
Measured in the Douay-Rheims Bible.
Its shelves ›The Old Testament of the Greek Septuagint: the Catholic canon and, besides it, 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees and the Letter of Jeremiah, with a Psalter of 151 psalms. The Prayer of Manasseh and 4 Maccabees stand as an appendix and are not counted here.
Old Testament measured in Brenton's Septuagint; New Testament in the King James Version, as Brenton translated the Old Testament only.
Its shelves ›Chapters, drawn on one scale. The first block is the same books in every row, named as each tradition names them: the Tanakh, complete in itself, and the Old Testament, read alongside the New. It is nearly the same width throughout; the Catholic and Orthodox rows run a little wider there because their Esther and Daniel carry the Greek additions, and the Septuagint's Psalter has 151 psalms. The word counts above come from different translations chosen for this comparison, not editions prescribed for all members, so compare the shapes rather than the last digits. Book counts follow the canons as commonly printed; the Slavonic and Ethiopian churches receive more, and the books page shelves them.
Picture the Bible as one shelf. Each spine below is one book, and its width is its true share of the words. The Old Testament is 77% of the text; Psalms and Jeremiah, the two thickest spines, finish just 28 words apart at the top; and five books (Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John and Jude) are single-chapter books; not all five are letters.
Hover or tab to any spine for its numbers. The thinnest books are drawn at a minimum width so they stay visible; at true scale, 3 John would be narrower than the gap between spines.
Length is not one question. Psalms has by far the most chapters, but its verses are short; Esther's chapters are few and enormous. Choose a measure and watch the order rearrange itself.
Word figures are King James Version counts. The full table under the shelf above carries every measure for every book.
The “average chapter” runs about 664 words, a comfortable few minutes. But the spread is wide: 146 chapters come in under 300 words, and 23 run past 1,500. Both extremes are Psalms, two pages apart: Psalm 117, two verses long, and Psalm 119, a single chapter longer than 21 entire books of the Bible.
Each column is a 200-word bin; hover for the chapters it holds. Median chapter: 627 words.
Average words per verse is a fingerprint of genre. Hebrew poetry moves in short parallel lines: Proverbs averages just 16.4 words a verse, the leanest book in the Bible. Narrative runs long: Esther's verses average 33.7 words, more than double. Group the books and the pattern is plain.
Words per verse in the KJV, averaged across each group's books. The letters and the poetry are the short-versed ends of the library; the prophets and the histories the long.
Fifteen complete English editions on this site translate the same 66 books, and none lands on the same number of words. The spread tells a story about vocabulary: the Bible in Basic English is the longest of all at 839,208 words (restricting itself to a tiny vocabulary means saying things the long way), while the modern Berean Standard Bible says it in 726,022, about 15% fewer.
Counted over the shared 66 books only, with one counting rule for all, so the bars measure translation style rather than contents. This comparison is limited to editions containing these 66 books; Tanakh editions are complete on their own terms and are measured separately above.
Across all 64 editions in 40 languages here, the chapter grid barely moves: 56 complete editions carry exactly 1,189 chapters. The exceptions are different arrangements, longer forms of some books, and a documented transcription gap. The seven books where any edition differs:
Two editions total something other than 1,189: the Douay-Rheims reaches 1,197 by printing the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel as chapters, and the Korean Bible of 1910 stands at 1,188 because its digital transcription lost 1 Peter 5, a gap named plainly on the versions page.
“Jesus wept”: two words in English, and the favorite answer to a famous trivia question. Here is John 11:35 in every language of this site, shortest first. Chinese does it in five characters; German takes the scenic route with “Und Jesus gingen die Augen über.”
Lengths are letter counts (spaces aside), which is a playful measure, not a scholarly one; a Chinese character, a Tamil syllable and a Latin letter are different kinds of thing. Each rendering is from the edition this site prefers for that language. The 🔊 buttons speak with your device's own voices; a dimmed button means that language's voice isn't installed on this device (how to add one).
Every figure on this page is computed from the texts on this site by its own build tooling; nothing is quoted from elsewhere. A “word” is an unbroken run of letters and digits, so “three and twentieth” is three words and “king's” is one; other counters draw those lines differently, which is why published totals for the KJV range from about 780,000 to 790,000. Word-level figures use the King James Version; chapter structure is compared across all 64 editions. If the texts change, the numbers here are rebuilt from scratch, and a second, independent script re-counts everything with different code and checks every figure in this page's text against the published structure of the KJV before it ships.
The structural counts here are not new; they match figures that have been published for the King James Version for two centuries. The word-level measurements are this site's own, and land within the published range. For checking our arithmetic against the wider world:
Explore model-based language similarities among chapters of the Berean Standard Bible's 66-book Protestant canon.
Explore the books and their place in four scriptural traditions.
Trace direct revisions and documented influences across Bible translations.
