How many chapters are in the Bible?

The count

The Protestant Bible contains 1,189 chapters:

• Old Testament: 929 chapters across 39 books.
• New Testament: 260 chapters across 27 books.

The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles add additional chapters in the deuterocanonical books — about 173 additional chapters in the Catholic OT.

A medieval addition

Chapter divisions do not exist in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. They are a medieval scholarly tool, introduced to make scripture easier to cite and to navigate.

The standard chapter divisions are traditionally attributed to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, around 1227 CE. Langton’s divisions were adopted in the Latin Vulgate, from which they passed into all later European Bibles, including Jewish editions of the Hebrew Bible from the 16th century onward.

Verse divisions came later:

• Old Testament verses: introduced by Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus in the 1440s for his Hebrew concordance.
• New Testament verses: introduced by Robert Estienne (Stephanus) in his 1551 Greek New Testament. Estienne reportedly made many of his verse divisions while travelling on horseback between Paris and Lyon.

What this means for reading

Because chapter and verse divisions were added centuries after the texts were written, they sometimes fall in unfortunate places — interrupting a thought, separating a quotation from its introduction, or grouping unrelated material together. Reading “by paragraph” or “by literary unit” rather than strictly chapter-by-chapter often yields a more natural sense of the text.

Notable examples of awkward chapter breaks:

• Genesis 1:31 ends “and the seventh day God ended his work” — but the seventh day is described in 2:1-3. The natural unit is Genesis 1:1–2:3.
• Isaiah 53 begins mid-thought; the natural unit is Isaiah 52:13–53:12.
• 1 Corinthians 11:1 belongs thematically to chapter 10, not chapter 11.

The shortest and longest

• Shortest chapter: Psalm 117 (2 verses, 33 words in Hebrew).
• Longest chapter: Psalm 119 (176 verses, an acrostic on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet).
• Middle chapter of the Bible: Psalm 117.