Determining the longest book of the Bible requires us first to determine in what way we desire to answer the question. We can count the number of verses in each book to determine which is the longest; but verse numbers were added to the text in the 1400s and 1500s, they are not part of the original manuscripts. Counting the number of words would be more accurate.
The Bible was originally written primarily in Hebrew and Greek, though there are a few passages in Aramaic. There is not always a one-to-one correlation of word numbers when translating Hebrew or Greek to English. Thus it makes the most sense for our word count to be based on the original languages.
If we count the number of words in the original languages, then the longest book of the Old Testament, and the Bible as a whole, is the book of Jeremiah, which contains a total of 33,002 words. Genesis is the second longest book with a total count of 32,046 words. The book of Psalms contains the largest number of chapters, but only comes in third in actual length when we consider the total number of words at 30,147. In the New Testament, the longest book is the Gospel of Luke, which in the original Greek has a total of 19,482 words; Luke slots in at twelfth place in overall length when compared to the rest of Scripture.
The easiest way to determine these numbers in the original languages is to use a good Bible software program. The numbers in this article were found using Logos Bible Software, with our special thanks.
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