The shortest verse in the Berean Standard Bible is John 11:35, at eleven characters and two words. It is shortest by character count and by word count, and second place is two characters behind. The eleven verses after it are nearly all fragments of lists: town names, livestock tallies, names in a genealogy, and the line that opens a speech.
Jesus wept.
How this list was made
Three choices decide the answer to this question. Every list of short verses has to make them, and most lists never say which way they went. These are the choices here.
- Translation. The Berean Standard Bible, which was placed in the public domain in April 2023. Verse lengths change from one translation to the next.
- Measure. Characters, counting spaces and punctuation, in the English text.
- Language. English. The Hebrew and Greek behind the English give different answers, and one of them is below.
The counts were taken from the full BSB text, all 31,086 verses, sorted by length. No verse was chosen by hand.
The shortest verses in the Berean Standard Bible
Eight verses are shorter than everything else in the Bible. Four more tie for ninth place at seventeen characters, so the honest list runs to twelve rather than ten. They are grouped below by length, shortest first.
- Eleven characters. John 11:35 reads:
Jesus wept.
- Thirteen characters. Two verses tie here. 1 Chronicles 6:58 reads:
Hilen, Debir,
Joshua 21:15 reads:
Holon, Debir,
- Fourteen characters. Two verses tie here. Numbers 31:33 reads:
72,000 cattle,
Numbers 31:44 reads:
36,000 cattle,
- Fifteen characters. Three verses tie here. Luke 20:30 reads:
Then the second
Numbers 31:34 reads:
61,000 donkeys,
Numbers 31:45 reads:
30,500 donkeys,
- Seventeen characters. Four verses tie here, which is why a clean top ten is not available. 1 Chronicles 1:25 reads:
Eber, Peleg, Reu,
1 Chronicles 12:26 reads:
From Levi: 4,600,
Job 6:1 reads:
Then Job replied:
Joshua 21:14 reads:
Jattir, Eshtemoa,
What changes if you count words instead of characters
John 11:35 still comes first, but it stops coming first alone. Nine verses in the BSB are two words long. Behind those nine, 119 verses are three words long. So a top ten by word count does not exist at all: tenth place is a 119-way tie.
The nine two-word verses are John 11:35, Joshua 21:14, Joshua 21:15, 1 Chronicles 6:58, 1 Chronicles 6:68, Numbers 31:33, Numbers 31:34, Numbers 31:44 and Numbers 31:45.
Counting letters alone moves the answer again, because four of the shortest verses are livestock tallies written mostly in digits.
| What you count | Shortest verse in the BSB | What ties with it |
|---|---|---|
| Characters, counting spaces and punctuation | John 11:35, at 11 characters | Nothing. Second place is 13 characters. |
| Words, split on spaces | John 11:35, at 2 words | Eight other verses, also 2 words each. |
| Letters only, ignoring digits and punctuation | Numbers 31:33 and Numbers 31:44, at 6 letters each | Each other. John 11:35 has 9 letters. |
Why other lists give different answers
Two things move the answer: which English translation you are reading, and whether you count the English or the language behind it.
The translation
John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the King James Version and in many other English translations. In the New International Version the shortest verse is Job 3:2, according to the Wikipedia article on the phrase. The BSB gives Job 3:2 six words, so it does not come close to the list above:
And this is what he said:
The language
In the Greek New Testament, the shortest verse is not John 11:35. It is Luke 20:30, which reads as three Greek words and twelve letters in the Morphological Greek New Testament. The BSB follows that reading, which is why Luke 20:30 is in the list above at fifteen characters. The Greek text behind the King James Version has a longer reading of the same verse, with the second brother taking the wife and dying childless, as the parallel Greek texts show. Two translations can disagree about the length of a verse because they are translating different Greek.
The shortest verses in the Old Testament and the New Testament
The shortest Old Testament verses are 1 Chronicles 6:58 and Joshua 21:15, both thirteen characters, both a pair of town names inside a list of towns given to the Levites. The shortest New Testament verse is John 11:35. Here are the ten shortest New Testament verses in the BSB, in order. This is where the short verses that read as whole sentences are.
- John 11:35:
Jesus wept.
- Luke 20:30:
Then the second
- Luke 17:32:
Remember Lot’s wife!
- 1 Thessalonians 5:16:
Rejoice at all times.
- 1 Thessalonians 5:17:
Pray without ceasing.
- 1 Corinthians 16:14:
Do everything in love.
- John 6:48:
I am the bread of life.
- Hebrews 13:25:
Grace be with all of you.
- Mark 4:14:
The farmer sows the word.
- John 10:30:
I and the Father are one.”
Luke 20:30 is the only fragment in that list. The other nine read as complete sentences, which is not true of the whole-Bible list further up. John 10:30 carries a closing quotation mark because it ends a speech that begins several verses earlier, and the mark is part of the verse as the BSB punctuates it.
Where the verse numbers came from
Verse boundaries are not part of the original text. The Parisian printer Robert Estienne numbered the verses of the Greek New Testament in his 1551 edition, and his 1555 Latin Vulgate was the first Bible to print the numbers inside the text. The first English Bible to carry both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible of 1560, according to the Wikipedia article on chapters and verses.
That is why the shortest verses look the way they do. A verse is a line on a printer’s grid laid over text that was written without one. John 11:35 is short because the sentence is short. Joshua 21:15 is short because a long list of town names had to break somewhere, and it broke there.