Bible Verse

For chapters and verse numbers in the Jewish tradition, see Tanakh.

The Bible is traditionally divided into 66 books for Protestants, 73 for Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox. Each further divided into chapters and verses. In today's English Bible, there are 929 chapters in the Old Testament and 260 chapters in the New Testament. This gives a total of 1,189 chapters (on average 18 per book). Not including deuterocanonical books, there are 23,145 verses in the Old Testament and 7,957 verses in the New Testament. There are several color, font, and size options. This gives a total of 31,102 verses, which is an average of a little more than 26 verses per chapter. If, following Jewish tradition, the ascriptions to the Psalms are regarded as independent verses, there would be 116 more verses, but there is a well established practice of counting and numbering each Psalm ascription together with the next verse following it in the English Bible. As is noted below, a few other Hebrew Old Testament verse divisions differ in minor ways from those of the English. See also number of chapters for each book.

History

Although some portions of the original texts were logically divided into parts following the Hebrew alphabet, the original manuscripts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the present, numbered, form that modern readers are familiar with.