What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?
The longest complete single volume often read by believers is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace at roughly 1,225 pages and 587,000 words, while within the Bible itself, the individual book with the highest word count is Jeremiah at over 33,000 words
Here’s a list of the ten longest books of the Bible. This is going by word count in the original languages (not any English translation of the Bible). I referenced the Lexham Hebrew Bible for OT books and the NA27 for NT books, and here’s what I got:
- Jeremiah (33,002 words)
- Genesis (32,046 words)
- Psalms (30,147 words)
- Ezekiel (29,918 words)
- Exodus (25, 957 words)
- Isaiah (25,608 words)
- Numbers (25,048 words)
- Deuteronomy (23,008 words)
- Second Chronicles (21,349 words)
- First Samuel (20,361 words)
Notice anything interesting? The entire top-10 list of longest books in the Bible are all Old Testament books! Four of the five books of the Torah are here, all three major prophets are present, and even one book of poetry made it into the top 10.
(For the most part, this lines up with David J. Reimer‘s list on Justin Taylor’s blog—though Reimer’s count puts Isaiah before Exodus.)
So Jeremiah is the longest book of the Bible, right? Sure, if we’re going by modern books and their arrangements. This count is a little deceptive, though. Several books of the Old Testament are actually volumes of a larger original work. Why?
Because scrolls.
For example, First Samuel and Second Samuel were originally just Samuel. But back then, you wrote these kinds of stories on scrolls: and Samuel was just too long to reasonably fit on one. So they split it up into parts one and two.