The Shortest Bible Verse in Chinese
Answering: “shortest verse in the Bible Chinese”
Updated 2026-09-22 · plain text · JSON
Two answers exist, and both are worth stating. Measured strictly, the shortest verse in this edition is Job 3:2 — a single character, 说 ("said"), because the edition splits the speech formula into its own verse. That is a fact about verse division, not about the text.
The verse people mean is John 11:35: 耶稣哭了, Yēsū kū le, "Jesus wept". Four characters, and each of them common — 耶稣 is the name, 哭 is "to cry" and 了 marks the completed action. It is the first verse many learners can read without help.
Other four-character verses are the commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5: 不可杀人, 不可奸淫, 不可偷盗 — "do not kill", "do not commit adultery", "do not steal". They are a good first reading precisely because the grammar is bare.
| Verse | Chinese | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| Job 3:2 | 说： | 1 |
| John 11:35 | 耶稣哭了。 | 4 |
| Exodus 20:13 | 不可杀人。 | 4 |
| Exodus 20:14 | 不可奸淫。 | 4 |
| Exodus 20:15 | 不可偷盗。 | 4 |
Average verse: 30 characters. Punctuation is not counted.
Questions
- How is 耶稣哭了 pronounced?
- Yēsū kū le — first tone, first tone, first tone, neutral. The verse page plays it and shows stroke order for each character.
- Why is Job 3:2 so short?
- Because the verse division puts the words "and Job said" in a verse of their own, and Chinese needs only one character for them.
- What is the longest?
- Jeremiah 43:5, at 97 characters.
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).