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Bible Q

In the book of Psalms, which is the shortest verse and which is the longest verse?

Answered by . May 2, 2010 - 11:57 pm

This information is based on the Authorised Version (KJV). Other versions differ.

By word count there are two shortest verses, both with 7 words each:

LORD, remember David, and all his afflictions  Ps 132:1

His foundation is in the holy mountains. Ps 87 : 1

The longest verse has 45 words:

For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup, and the wine is red; it is full of mixture; and he poureth out of the same: but the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drink them. Ps 75 : 8

By character count, three shortest verses share 28 characters:

I said in my haste, All men are liars. Ps 116 : 11

I will love thee, O LORD, my strength. Ps 18 : 1

Unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul. Ps 25 : 1

And the longest has 181 characters:

From men which are thy hand, O LORD, from men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes. Ps 17 : 14

One Reply to “In the book of Psalms, which is the shortest verse and which is the longest verse?”

  1. Tech note: To generate these statistics, I loaded the text of the KJV into an sql table, one verse per row (from http://www.htmlbible.com/#free). The number of words per verse is LEN(REPLACE(RTrim(TextData), ‘ ‘, ‘–‘)) – LEN(RTrim(TextData)) + 1, and the number of characters is LEN(TextData) – words + 1 (using mssql)