This is pretty strange or odd how it worked out this way. Even if you are not religious, you should read this.
What is the shortest chapter in the Bible?
Answer - Psalm 117
What is the longest chapter in the Bible?
Answer - Psalm 119
Which chapter is in the center of the Bible?
Answer - Psalms 118
Fact: There are 594 chapters before Psalms 118. There are 594 chapters after Psalms 118. Add these numbers up and you get 1188.
What is the center verse in the Bible?
Answer - Psalms 118:8
Does this verse say something significant about God's perfect will for our lives?
Did you know . . .
1) Psalm 118 is the middle chapter of the entire Bible?
2) Psalm 117, before Psalm 118 is the shortest chapter in the Bible?
3) Psalm 119, after Psalm 118 is the longest chapter in the Bible?
4) The Bible has 594 chapters before Psalm 118 and 594 chapters after Psalm 118?
5) If you add up all the chapters except Psalm 118, you get a total of 1188 chapters?
6) 1188 or Psalm 118 verse 8 is the middle verse of the entire Bible?
Should the central verse not have a fairly important message? "It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man." - Psalm 118:8
Is this central verse not also the central theme of the entire Bible? This is not a coincidence. God is in complete control.
Origins: The first question to be considered in determining the "center chapter" of the Bible is: Which Bible? The information quoted above certainly doesn't
apply to the Hebrew Bible, which doesn't include the New Testament or some portions of the books of Esther and Daniel. Do we base our calculations on versions of the Bible used by Protestant denominations, which include the New Testament but omit the same portions of Esther and Daniel as the Hebrew Bible, or do we base them upon a Catholic version of the Bible, which contains the excluded portions of Esther and Daniel as well as seven additional deuterocanonical books (also known as the Apocrypha)?
We opted for the King James Version of the Bible, which seems to fit the intent of whoever devised the information quoted above. But, using the on-line version of the KJV found at the The Bible Gateway, and adding up the numbers several times (both manually and
using a calculator), we didn't obtain the expected results.
According to our reckoning, 1189 chapters comprise the King James Version of the Bible. This means the "center chapter" of the Bible would be the 595th chapter (i.e., it is both preceded and followed by 594 other chapters); there are 478 chapters in all the books up through the end of the book of Job (which immediately precedes the book of Psalms), so the center chapter of the Bible would be Psalm 117, not Psalm 118 as claimed.
Psalm 117 (in the King James Bible) reads as follows:
O praise the LORD, all ye nations: praise him,
all ye people.
For his merciful kindness is great toward
us: and the truth of the LORD endureth for
ever. Praise ye the LORD.
As far as the total number of verses in the entire Bible, we didn't count them ourselves but instead referred to James Montgomery Boice's Psalms: An Expositional Commentary(Vol. 3), which notes:
It is reported by people who count such things that there are 31,174 verses in the Bible, and if that is so, then these verses, the 15,587th and the 15,588th, are the middle verses. That position should be reason enough to give them prominence.
What do you suppose a middle verse should say? Shouldn't the middle verse of the Bible be John 3:16, or its equivalent? Or something from Psalm 23? At least it should be about God's love, perhaps "God is love" (I John 4:8). Actually, the middle verses of the Bible are none of these or anything else we might naturally expect . . .
If the Bible has 31,174 verses — an even number — then there is no one "center" verse: as suggested above, the center would be a combination of the 15,587th and the 15,588th verses, which do fall within Psalm 118(Psalm 118:8-9, to be exact):
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in princes.
Psalm 117 (with a mere 2 verses) is indeed the shortest chapter in the Bible, and Psalm 119 (with 176 verses) is the longest, but whether those facts reflect a significant construction to the holy book depends upon whether one is counting chapters or verses. Either way, we're not sure why having the "center chapter" of the Bible flanked by the shortest and longest chapters should necessarily be considered remarkable — it seems to us that a much better expression of symmetry and perfection would be for the center chapter itself to be the longest, flanked by the two shortest chapters (or vice-versa). In any case, reading a message into the layout of the Bible is problematic, as chapter and verse divisions were not added to the ancient texts that comprise the modern Bible until many centuries after their origination.
Last updated: 13 July 2007
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apply to the Hebrew Bible, which doesn't include the New Testament or some portions of the books of Esther and Daniel. Do we base our calculations on versions of the Bible used by Protestant denominations, which include the New Testament but omit the same portions of Esther and Daniel as the Hebrew Bible, or do we base them upon a Catholic version of the Bible, which contains the excluded portions of Esther and Daniel as well as seven additional deuterocanonical books (also known as the Apocrypha)?
