How Many Chapters Are in the Bible? Every Book, Counted

The totals

Across the 66 books of the Protestant canon there are 1,189 chapters and, in the traditional count, 31,102 verses. The Old Testament carries most of that weight: 929 chapters against the New Testament's 260. Read one chapter a day and the whole Bible takes three years and three months; read 3.26 a day and it takes exactly one.

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include additional books (Tobit, Judith, 1-2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, plus longer forms of Esther and Daniel), which adds roughly 170-190 chapters depending on the edition. The counts below follow the Protestant canon, which is what most reading plans and most online Bibles assume.

Chapters in every book of the Old Testament

Thirty-nine books, 929 chapters. The five books of Moses alone are 187 chapters; the twelve Minor Prophets together are only 67.

Chapters in every book of the New Testament

Twenty-seven books, 260 chapters. The four Gospels and Acts are 117 of them — almost half — which is why a "New Testament in 90 days" plan spends its first six weeks on narrative.

Records and oddities

A few numbers people ask about, all from the same 1,189:

• Longest book: Psalms, 150 chapters. Longest chapter: Psalm 119, at 176 verses — an acrostic poem with eight verses for each of the 22 Hebrew letters.
• Shortest chapter: Psalm 117, two verses. It sits two chapters before the longest.
• One-chapter books: Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John and Jude. They are usually cited by verse alone ("Jude 3"), since there is no chapter to name.
• Books split in two — 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles — were single books in the Hebrew Bible. The split came with the Greek translation, where the longer text needed two scrolls.
• By word count the Bible is roughly three-quarters Old Testament, but by chapter count it is closer to four-fifths, because New Testament chapters run longer on average.

Where the chapter numbers came from

None of the biblical authors wrote in chapters. The system in every modern Bible is credited to Stephen Langton, a lecturer in Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, around 1227. Verse numbers came three centuries later: Robert Estienne, a Paris printer, added them to his Greek New Testament in 1551 and to a whole Bible in 1555, reportedly working on horseback between Paris and Lyon — which is one traditional explanation for a few verse breaks that land mid-sentence.

This is worth knowing for one practical reason. Chapter breaks are helpful for finding a passage and unhelpful for understanding one. Genesis 1 ends at verse 31 but the creation account runs to 2:3; John 3 opens mid-conversation with a man introduced at the end of chapter 2. When a chapter seems to start or end abruptly, read across the line — the number is a medieval bookmark, not a boundary the author drew.

What the count means for a reading plan

Divide 1,189 by the days you have and you get the pace: 3.26 chapters a day for a year, 1.63 for two years, just over 13 a day for 90 days. But chapters are not equal in length — Psalm 117 and Psalm 119 are both "one chapter" — so plans built purely on chapter counts have lopsided days.

Better plans balance by reading time rather than chapter number, and mix a long Old Testament chapter with a short Psalm or a Gospel passage. That is the structure behind most one-year plans, including the one on this site, and it is why they read as three short passages a day rather than three consecutive chapters of Leviticus.