One of the best habits to form when studying the Bible is to read the entire book you’re working through within one sitting. Here’s an infographic comparing the shortest books of the Bible to the longest books of the Bible. It explores how each of the Bible’s 66 books fit into the big picture, and you’ll walk away with enough knowledge to have a thoughtful conversation about the Bible with a pastor, an atheist, or anyone else. The Beginner’s Guide to the Bible gives you an overview of what the Bible is, what it’s for, and what it’s all about. If we were going by verse count, we’d still know the shortest books of the Bible, but we’d have them out of order. Second John has fewer verses than Third John, but more words. Philemon has more verses than Obadiah (the shortest book in the Old Testament), but fewer words. And if we were going by verse count, we’d be dealing with a different ordered list. “That’s a lot of work, dude! Why not just count the verses?”īecause verses vary in length, and with such brief books, it’s best not to risk it. Again, these aren’t listed by English word count: this is from the underlying Greek and Hebrew. I got these word counts using Word Lists in Logos Bible Software. Each of these books is only one chapter long, and would take you a few minutes to read, tops: These measurements are by words in the original languages. Here are the five shortest books of the Bible, beginning with the very shortest. In fact, the shortest books of the Bible are shorter than this blog post. The Bible is a pretty long book, and that might give the impression that every book of the Bible is long, too.īut good news! Not every book of the Bible is so long. Spoiler alert: the shortest book of the Bible is 3 John, just about 200 words long in its original Greek language.

I will cause you to become a byword