The Number of Verses in the Bible

There are a few different numbers floating around for the total number of verses in the Bible.  Most people, when looking for a count, will just find and quote one of these numbers. No one has time or patience to actually count the verses. And probably the easiest way to do this would be to add up the number of verses in each of the 1189 chapters. We know how many verses a chapter has by looking at the number of the last verse. But still, this would take time.

However, building the Bible search engine (Bible SuperSearch) has enabled us to have computers do the counting for us. And the number of verses always came out to be 31,102. In order to build the Bible search engine, the Bible was imported into a (MySQL) database for easy querying. Each Bible has it’s own database table. For the KJV, the table is ‘bible_kjv’.

In the table, each verse has it’s own row:

In addition to book, chapter, verse, and text, each row has a unique numerical index. This index is auto-incremented. It starts at 1 for Genesis 1:1 and increments by 1 for every verse. For Revelation 22:21, the last verse in the Bible, we see that this index came out to be 31,102. 

We can also run a MySQL query to count the number of rows in the table:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `bible_kjv`

We get 31,102.  Since each verse has it’s own row in the table, this is the number of verses in this Bible.

We can also query the number of verses in the Old and New Testaments:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM bible_kjv WHERE book BETWEEN 1 and 39

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM bible_kjv WHERE book BETWEEN 40 and 66

The Old Testament has 23,145 verses and the New Testament has 7,957 verses.

We can also break down these verse counts by book:

SELECT bible_books_en.number AS ‘Order’, bible_books_en.fullname AS Book,

COUNT(DISTINCT bible_kjv.chapter) AS Chapters, COUNT(*) AS Verses

FROM `bible_kjv`

INNER JOIN bible_books_en ON bible_books_en.number = bible_kjv.book

GROUP BY bible_kjv.book
ORDER BY bible_kjv.book

Compare these numbers with Blue Letter Bible’s results here: https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/misc/66books.cfm  (I have included this link because they too have a Bible search engine, and are also able to query for these numbers.)

Here’s another interesting article on the number of verses (and words) in the Bible: https://www.biblebelievers.com/believers-org/kjv-stats.html

So, the King James Version has 31,102 verses.  What about other Bibles?

We can query the count of other Bibles that we have on the search engine the same way we did for the KJV:

SELECT COUNT(*) from bible_bishops

So we see that most full Bibles produced a verse count of 31,102.  The only one that didn’t is the French Martin Bible.  (At 31,103, it appears to be one verse off, but querying it against the KJV shows that it is numbered significantly different.   Verses are split at different points. )

The verse numbering in the Authorized King James Version became the standard, and all complete Bibles that use the KJV’s numbering, without omitting verses due to textual preference, will have 31,102 verses.

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