The Longest Bible Verse in Chinese
Answering: “longest verse in the Bible Chinese”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Length here is counted in Chinese characters, punctuation excluded, over the simplified text. In other languages the longest verse is usually named as Esther 8:9; Chinese counts differently because the same content takes a different number of characters, so the answer is edition-specific and this one is for the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified).
Long verses cluster in lists and legal material: a single verse enumerating officials, gifts or measurements can run for lines. The average verse, by contrast, is 30 characters.
The verse page shows it in parallel with your own language, with pinyin and word-by-word meanings — which is the only comfortable way to read a verse of this length while learning.
To put 97 characters in proportion: an average chapter runs 775 characters, so this one verse is about 13% of a chapter, or roughly 3 average verses laid end to end.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Longest verse | Jeremiah 43:5 — 97 characters |
| Average verse | 30 characters |
| Average chapter | 775 characters |
| Whole Bible | 921,149 characters |
Questions
- Is Esther 8:9 not the longest?
- It is in several English translations. Counted in Chinese characters in this edition, Jeremiah 43:5 is longer.
- What is the shortest?
- Job 3:2 is a single character in this edition; the shortest with real content are four characters, including John 11:35, 耶稣哭了.
- How is a character counted?
- Only CJK characters count. Punctuation, quotation marks and any Latin text are excluded.
Related reference pages
Take it further
- 97 ready-made vocabulary decks — by HSK level, by book or by topic, exportable to Anki, Pleco or Quizlet.
- Printable 田字格 worksheets — passages with pinyin, meanings and tracing rows.
- The parallel reader — Chinese, pinyin and your own language side by side, every word tappable.
- The dataset behind these numbers — plain JSON, free to reuse with attribution.
How these numbers were produced
- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain — 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,021 verses.
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation). A different segmenter gives slightly different word counts; character counts are unaffected.
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9.
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute — an assumption about a fluent adult reader, not a measurement.
- Computed: 2026-09-22, from the text on this site.
These are counts anyone can reproduce from the published dataset. They are not a peer-reviewed linguistic study, and the difficulty rankings are one stated formula rather than a validated readability score.
Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike. Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).