What Is the Longest Verse in the Bible?
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Our Bible is an amazing mix of history, narrative, poetry, Law, prophecy, wisdom, epistles, and apocalyptic literature. Long books, short books, long chapters, short chapters, long verses, and short verses make up the whole of the Scriptures. But what is the longest verse in the Bible?
This verse occurs in an Old Testament book. Esther 8:9 is generally considered to be the longest verse in the Bible, with eighty words and 367 characters. It reads:
“The king’s scribes were summoned at that time, in the third month, which is the month of Sivan, on the twenty-third day. And an edict was written, according to all that Mordecai commanded concerning the Jews, to the satraps and the governors and the officials of the provinces from India to Ethiopia, 127 provinces, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, and also to the Jews in their script and their language.”
What Happens in This Verse, and the Story of Esther?
Esther contains but ten chapters, and in chapter eight, we are close to the culmination of the book. We will look at how the story unfolded.
King Ahasuerus ruled Persia at the time this narrative occurs. Because of the king’s pride and a concurrent series of events, he removed his queen and replaced her with Esther, a Jewish virgin chosen as Ahasuerus’ next queen.
Mordecai, Esther’s cousin and guardian, kept a close watch on Esther via the king’s gate. “In those days, as Mordecai was sitting at the king’s gate, Bigthan and Teresh, two of the king’s eunuchs, who guarded the threshold, became angry and sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. And this came to the knowledge of Mordecai, and he told it to Queen Esther, and Esther told the king in the name of Mordecai. When the affair was investigated and found to be so, the men were both hanged on the gallows. And it was recorded in the book of the chronicles in the presence of the king” (Esther 2:21-23).
The king later appointed Haman the Agagite as second-in-command, and even though it was the king’s command, Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman was enraged and did not direct his ire solely at Mordecai, but at Mordecai’s people, the Jews. “Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus” (Esther 3:6). Haman presented his case to King Ahasuerus, painting the Jewish people as those who sought to usurp the king’s rule and not follow his commands. “So the king took his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, the enemy of the Jews. And the king said to Haman, ‘The money is given to you, the people also, to do with them as it seems good to you.’ Letters were sent by couriers to all the king’s provinces with instruction to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day, the thirteenth day of the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods” (Esther 3:11, 13).
The Jews were in great distress and Mordecai got word to Esther, asking her to beg for favor from the king. Her reply to Mordecai was a weak one, telling him she could only go before the king when summoned. And Mordecai inspired her – and all of us as well – with this, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Esther asked for a time of prayer and fasting, after which she went before the king with a plan to reveal Haman, so as to plead for deliverance for the Jews (Esther 4:1-17).
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During the time between the two feasts Esther had prepared for the king and Haman, Haman’s ire was again stoked against Mordecai, and he conspired to have Mordecai hanged, going so far as to have gallows erected. That same night, the king couldn’t sleep and had a look through the chronicles of his reign. He found the account of when Mordecai revealed a conspiracy against the king. The next day Ahasuerus, in an act of sheer irony, asked Haman what was to be done to honor a man “whom the king delights to honor?” Haman thought it was he, so he blustered about the honor that should be bestowed on the man. Haman is mortified when he learns the king plans to bestow the honors on Mordecai, and Haman is chosen by the king to parade Mordecai through town boasting of his honor.
At the second feast, Esther reveals her people and Haman as the one who plans to kill her people. Haman, while the king is in the courtyard, falls on Esther’s couch to beg for mercy and the king finds him there. “So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then the wrath of the king abated” (Esther 7:10).
Esther again went before the king and pled for her people. He said he could not rescind the decree, yet there was another plan, and it follows our featured verse. The edict written that day, “saying that the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, children and women included, and to plunder their goods,” and “Now in the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, on the thirteenth day of the same, when the king’s command and edict were about to be carried out, on the very day when the enemies of the Jews hoped to gain the mastery over them, the reverse occurred: the Jews gained mastery over those who hated them. The Jews gathered in their cities throughout all the provinces of King Ahasuerus to lay hands on those who sought their harm. And no one could stand against them” (Esther 9:1-2).
So, then, Esther 8:9 is pivotal as regards the history of the Jewish people. The law passed in Esther 8:9 is a parallel to the law invoked by Haman in Esther 3:12-13.
Even though there is no mention of God in this book, He is all over it because (1) it is in the Bible and, (2) it displays His providence and fulfillment of His promises. He said He would preserve His people, and God cannot lie.
Who Wrote Esther?
Biblical scholars have not pin-pointed the author of Esther, yet, according to John MacArthur, three names are in top consideration as the likeliest to have penned the book: Mordecai, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The possibility of a different Persian Jew writing Esther also exists — one who later emigrated back to Israel. Whoever wrote the book of Esther had an intimate understanding of the Persian society, including its etiquette, its history, and the layout of the Susa palace. The author also displayed keen awareness of the Hebrew calendar and customs.
What Is the Shortest Verse in the Bible?
In our English language translations, John 11:35 is deemed the shortest verse in the Bible. It reads, “Jesus wept.” This verse reflects our Lord’s reaction when He heard of the death of His friend, Lazarus.
There is, however, another two-word verse: 1 Thessalonians 5:16, “Rejoice always.” In the original Greek, the characters reflected by the verse in 1 Thessalonians makes it shorter, yet it is part of a longer sentence separated by commas. John 11:35 is a complete sentence, so for us—in our translations — John 11:35 is the shortest complete Scriptural verse. Either way, both verses are quite impactful.
How Was the Bible Split into Verses?
The Bible we hold in our hands today differs from the Scriptures the generations before the mid-thirteenth century held. The Bible had virtually no divisions, so an untrained eye with no knowledge of the Hebrew language could look at, say, Deuteronomy and see no separate verses, just one long missive.
In the mid thirteenth century, however, biblical scholars began dividing the Bible into sections to make study of it easier. We must be clear there is no doctrinal weight to the divisions into chapters and verses — they were added solely for the sake of convenience.
The divisions in the Old Testament were made uniform in the early tenth century by the Ben Asher family, and a Jewish rabbi named Nathan is credited with dividing the Hebrew Old Testament into verses in AD 1448. Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury is recognized as having divided the Bible into chapters. In the mid-sixteenth century, Robert Stephanus (Estienne), a French printer, devised a verse numbering structure and was the first person to print a Bible with the verse numbers in each chapter. Thereafter, the first English Bible to have both chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible, published in 1560. This system has been followed with each Bible version since then.
Why Are Some Verses So Much Longer Than Others?
Literature is always bound by its genre and by its author. For example, the Apostle Paul was so prolific with long sentences (and verses), they are sometimes called “Pauline sentences.” Knowing the author’s style gives us another way to determine who wrote what. The translators’ goal, in using the verse divisions, is to help us understand the meaning of the passages we read. The verses are dependent upon our sentence structure — so what we read makes sense to us.
Why Is This Important for Us to Know?
Verse length gives the reader an indication of the theme which is being laid out by the author. And, just as in common literature, long verses seek to develop an idea or truth. Our key passage’s length indicates the author wanted to make a point which is pivotal to our understanding of the events which transpired.
Short verses give added weight to what is being stated. As such, the combination of short and long verses contributes much to our understanding of the emphasis the biblical authors placed on their text.
Yet the length of verses, chapters, and books of the Bible is nothing compared to the meaning within each book. The important thing for us to remember as we read the Scriptures is to keep the context of what we are reading at the forefront. As any astute Bible student knows, context is king. Therefore, yes, pray and do pay attention to the verse lengths, and meditate upon how it impacts how we understand the truth of the account.
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