What Is the Longest Book of the Bible? Not Psalms.

What is the longest book of the Bible?

Most people answer Psalms — and honestly, that’s a reasonable answer. But it’s only half right.

The complete answer depends on how you measure: chapters, verses, or original word count. Pick a different method and you get a different book. This guide walks through all three, shows you the 15 longest books ranked side by side, and answers the follow-up questions that always come up.

Why Everyone Says Psalms — and They’re Half Right

By the two most intuitive measures, the book of Psalms is the largest book in the Bible and it’s not close.

Psalms has 150 chapters. No other book comes near that number. Isaiah has 66. Jeremiah has 52. Genesis has 50. The gap between Psalms and the rest of the old testament books is enormous when you sort by chapter count alone.

By verse count, Psalms leads with 2,461 verses. Genesis comes in second — and it’s not even close at 1,533 verses. Every individual psalm is its own poem, prayer, or song, which is why the number of chapters and verse totals stack so high.

King David wrote many of the individual psalms, though not all of them — Psalms is actually a collection of books, assembled over centuries by various authors. Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses, and unnamed contributors all wrote portions of it. Think of it less like a single book and more like an anthology of sacred poetry covering the full range of human experience and human emotions: grief, praise of God, doubt, thanksgiving, lament, and joy. It’s the hymnbook of ancient Israel and remains central to Christian worship today.

The total number of verses in the book of Psalms — 2,461 — reflects that breadth. It’s not one man’s writing. It’s a collection that captures the word of God meeting the human heart across centuries.

So if someone asks what the longest book is and they mean “most chapters” or “most verses,” Psalms is the right answer. You’ll find deeply encouraging passages in our collection of encouraging Psalms verses that show why this book resonates so deeply across so many situations.

But chapter count and verse count aren’t the only ways to measure a book.

By Word Count, Jeremiah Is the Longest Book of the Bible

When you measure by word count in the original languages, the answer changes.

In the original Hebrew, the book of Jeremiah contains approximately 33,002 words. Psalms contains roughly 30,147 Hebrew words — nearly 3,000 fewer words than Jeremiah. That gap is significant enough that scholars treat Jeremiah as the longest book of the Bible by original language word count.

David J. Reimer, senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament studies, is among the scholars who have examined this distinction carefully. Research courtesy of David J. Reimer and others working in biblical metrics confirms that the total number of words in the original Hebrew places Jeremiah ahead of Psalms — a finding consistent across different scholarly analyses of the Masoretic Text.

This matters if you want a textually accurate answer rather than just a culturally common one. Understanding it also gives you a window into how differently the two books are structured — poetry versus prophecy, brevity versus depth, song versus sermon.

The 15 Longest Books of the Bible, Ranked

Here are the 15 longest books ranked by chapter count, with verse counts alongside for comparison. Save this table — it’s the most complete breakdown you’ll find in one place.

One pattern stands out immediately: the books of the Old Testament completely dominate. The major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — all appear in the top five. The long books of the New Testament don’t crack the top 10 by chapter count. When you compare the length of the books of the Bible across different books and genres, the gap between the testaments is striking. The books of the Old Testament contain far more historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, and prophecy — which is why the entire New Testament, with 27 books, still contributes fewer total words than the Old Testament’s 39 books.

Notice also that Jeremiah has more verses (1,364) than Isaiah (1,292) despite Isaiah having more chapters (66 vs. 52). This confirms what we said above: Jeremiah’s chapters run long and dense. By any word-based measure, it’s the largest book of the Bible.

For a deeper look at the verses themselves, our guide to Bible verses in Psalms shows why the book of Psalms resonates so deeply across every season of life.

Does Your English Translation Change the Answer?

Yes — and this is where things get interesting.

Hebrew is a compressed language. A single Hebrew word often carries layers of meaning that require two, three, or even four English words to express in translation. This means translating from the original languages to English always adds words. Different translation philosophies add different amounts.

Word-for-word translations (King James Version, English Standard Version, NASB) stay close to the original structure and produce more literal — and often longer — English text. In the KJV, Psalms runs to approximately 43,000 English words, well ahead of Jeremiah.

Thought-for-thought translations (New International Version, New Living Translation) prioritize natural English readability. The added interpretive words are distributed differently across books, which can narrow the gap between Psalms and Jeremiah in English word count.

It’s worth knowing that chapter divisions weren’t part of the original Hebrew or Greek texts — they were added by scholars in the 13th century AD. Bible translators work from those manuscripts and make real choices that affect the English word-count of every book. The total number of words in any given book depends entirely on which translation you’re reading and the decisions those bible translators made about phrasing and structure.

The practical answer: across all major English translations, Psalms remains the longest book of the Bible by chapter count and verse count. That never changes. In terms of words, the gap between Psalms and Jeremiah fluctuates based on which translation you’re reading. In the original Hebrew, Jeremiah wins on word count — that’s fixed regardless of translation. This distinction matters in Christian theology and biblical studies wherever scholars are working with the original texts rather than English versions.

Longest Book in the New Testament

The Gospel of Luke is the longest book in the New Testament by word count, containing approximately 19,482 Greek words in the original Greek.

The book of Acts comes in at roughly 18,450 Greek words — and here’s a detail worth noting: Luke and Acts share the same author. Luke, the physician who traveled with Paul, wrote both. Combined, these two books form one connected narrative that spans nearly 38,000 Greek words. If you treated them as a single work, they would rival several major Old Testament books in size.

Matthew — the first book of the New Testament as it appears in most Bibles — is close behind Luke in total verse count (1,071 verses vs. Luke’s 1,151). The Gospel of Mark, by contrast, is the shortest of the four Gospels. The Gospel of John adds theological depth but fewer total words than Luke. By word count in the original Greek text, Luke edges all of them. Luke traveled extensively with the apostle Paul, which gave both Luke and Acts their grounded, historically detailed character — shaped by eyewitness access from Paul’s missionary journeys.

The Shortest Books of the Bible

The contrast between the longest and shorter books of the Bible is dramatic. While Psalms spans 150 chapters, these books cover their entire message in a single chapter:

3 John — 1 chapter, 14 verses. A personal letter from the apostle John to a church leader named Gaius. You can read it aloud in about two minutes.

2 John (Second John) — 1 chapter, 13 verses. An epistle warning a church community about false teachers — it actually has the fewest verses of any of John’s letters.

The book of Obadiah — 1 chapter, 21 verses. The shortest book of the Bible in the Old Testament. A prophecy against the nation of Edom — intense, pointed, and complete in 21 verses.

Philemon — 1 chapter, 25 verses. Paul’s personal appeal to a slave owner on behalf of a runaway slave named Onesimus. One of the most personal letters in the New Testament.

These short books — along with others like Jude and Nahum — have the fewest verses in the entire Bible. Yet they each carry complete theological arguments. The name of the longest book (Psalms) and the name of the shortest (3 John) tell you almost nothing about the depth of what’s inside either one.

One More Record: Psalm 119

While the book of Psalms is the longest book overall, a single chapter holds its own record: Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the entire Bible at 176 verses.

It’s not just long — it’s architecturally precise. Psalm 119 is a Hebrew acrostic poem organized into 22 stanzas, one for each of the 22 Hebrew letters. The number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet determined the poem’s structure: every stanza contains exactly 8 verses, and each verse within a stanza begins with that stanza’s Hebrew letter. Every verse also references the word of God in some form — Torah, commandment, statute, decree, promise. The entire poem meditates on God’s instruction and the nature of God’s faithfulness to those who follow it.

Psalm 119 has been used for spiritual formation across centuries of Christian tradition — monks, reformers, and ordinary believers have worked through it verse by verse as a discipline. That structural design, though, is almost completely invisible in English translation. You’re reading what feels like an extended praise poem about Scripture, but in the original Hebrew it’s a masterpiece of intentional literary craft. It’s one of the clearest examples of why studying the original languages reveals dimensions of the Bible that no English translation can fully replicate.

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