The books of the Bible by category: the eight divisions

The short answer

The Protestant Bible's 66 books are commonly sorted into eight categories. The Old Testament has the Law (Genesis to Deuteronomy, 5 books), History (Joshua to Esther, 12), Wisdom or Poetry (Job to Song of Songs, 5) and the Prophets (Isaiah to Malachi, 17, split into 5 major and 12 minor). The New Testament has the Gospels (4), Acts (1), the Epistles (21 letters, 13 of them Paul's) and Revelation (1). The Hebrew Bible groups the same Old Testament books in three parts instead, the Torah, Prophets and Writings.

In this guide

1. The eight divisions of the Bible at a glance
2. Old Testament categories: Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets
3. New Testament categories: Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Revelation
4. The Hebrew Bible’s three parts: Torah, Prophets and Writings
5. How Catholic, Orthodox and Ethiopian Bibles sort their books
6. Using the divisions when you read
7. Questions people ask
8. Sources

The Bible is a library more than a single book, and sorting the books of the Bible by category is a quick way to see what is on its shelves. None of the categories is printed in the text itself. They are how readers, editors and whole traditions have grouped the books, and the traditions do not all group them the same way. Here are the eight divisions in common use, every book under its heading, and the older groupings beside them.

• 8divisions, four in each testament
• 250chapters in the Prophets, the most of any division
• 21letters, the most books in any division
• 67chapters in the twelve minor prophets, one more than Isaiah

The eight divisions of the Bible at a glance

The 66 books of the Protestant Bible fall into eight divisions: the Law, History, Wisdom and the Prophets in the Old Testament, and the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles and Revelation in the New. If a sequence helps you remember them, the Old Testament runs 5, 12, 5 and 17 books, and the New Testament 4, 1, 21 and 1.

Reading times come from our own word count of the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation, at 238 words a minute, the average adult pace for silent reading of non-fiction.

Three of the divisions are almost exactly the same size by chapters. History has 249, the Prophets 250 and Wisdom 243, each about a fifth of the Bible’s chapters. By words they are not close: a chapter of Wisdom averages about 335 words, because most psalms are short, while a chapter of History runs to about 770 and a chapter of the Gospels to about 900. So the Gospels are 7.5 percent of the Bible’s chapters but nearly 11 percent of its words.

Old Testament categories: Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets

The 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament fall into four divisions, which follow one another in order from Genesis to Malachi. Each table below lists a division’s books with their chapters and a line on what each book is known for.

The Law: Genesis to Deuteronomy

The first five books are the Law. Jewish tradition calls them the Torah, a Hebrew word that means “instruction” or “teaching” as well as “law”; many Christians call them the Pentateuch, from a Greek word for “five scrolls”; and they are also known as the Five Books of Moses. They run from creation to the death of Moses in the land of Moab, within sight of the promised land. Genesis and the first half of Exodus are mostly story, and much of what follows is law and instruction for worship.

History: Joshua to Esther

The twelve history books follow Israel from the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, through the judges and the kings, to the fall of both kingdoms and the return from exile in Babylon. Ruth is a short story set “in the days when the judges judged” (Ruth 1:1), and Esther takes place at the Persian court, among Jews carried into exile. The two books of Chronicles go over the centuries of Samuel and Kings a second time, beginning with nine chapters of genealogies.

Wisdom, or Poetry: Job to Song of Songs

Five books of poetry and wise sayings make up the Wisdom division: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, also called the Song of Solomon. You will also see the same shelf called the Poetic Books or the Sapiential Books. The Psalms alone are 150 of its 243 chapters, at an average of about 275 words each, which is why the division reads so much faster than its size suggests.

The Prophets: major and minor

The seventeen books of the Prophets are usually split in two. The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel; the minor prophets are the twelve books from Hosea to Malachi. The names describe length, not importance. They go back to Augustine of Hippo, who set the twelve shorter books apart from the four longer ones, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. Lamentations, traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, stands with the major prophets in most Protestant Bibles, right after his book.

The Hebrew Bible counts the twelve as a single book, called the Twelve, and the comparison is fair: together they have 67 chapters, one more than Isaiah alone, and by our count fewer words than Isaiah. Ten of the twelve take under 20 minutes each to read silently, so most can be read whole in one sitting.

New Testament categories: Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Revelation

The 27 books of the New Testament fall into four divisions, and Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Bibles all share the same 27, with the same 260 chapters. Two of the divisions are a single book each.

The Gospels

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are four accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, 89 chapters that take about five and a half hours to read. The first three are called the synoptic Gospels, from a Greek word for “seeing all together”, because they tell many of the same stories, often in a similar order and in similar wording. John’s Gospel is largely its own. If you are deciding where to begin, our guide to which Gospel to read first compares the four.

Acts

The Acts of the Apostles is the second half of a two-volume work: it shares its author with Luke’s Gospel and picks up where that Gospel ends. It tells how the church was founded and how its message spread across the Roman Empire, and it closes with Paul under arrest in Rome, waiting for his trial. It is 28 chapters, about an hour and 40 minutes of reading.

The Epistles: Paul’s letters and the general letters

The 21 letters of the New Testament fall into three sets: Paul’s thirteen, Hebrews, and the seven general letters. Paul’s run from Romans to Philemon, roughly longest first, with the letters to churches (Romans down to 2 Thessalonians) ahead of the letters to individuals, among them the three pastoral letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Our guide to how many books Paul wrote goes through them one by one.

Hebrews comes next. It does not name its author, and although it was long counted among Paul’s letters, few scholars now think he wrote it. The last seven, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, and Jude, are the general or catholic letters, names that probably reflect that most were addressed to the church at large rather than to one congregation or one person.

Revelation

The Book of Revelation is the last book of the New Testament and its only apocalyptic book. Its Greek title, apokalypsis, means “revelation” or “unveiling”, which is why it is also called the Apocalypse of John. It has 22 chapters and takes about 50 minutes to read.

The Hebrew Bible’s three parts: Torah, Prophets and Writings

The Hebrew Bible arranges the same books as the Protestant Old Testament in three parts rather than four: the Torah (Teaching), the Nevi’im (Prophets) and the Ketuvim (Writings). The word Tanakh is made from the first letters of the three. It counts 24 books rather than 39, because Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra–Nehemiah are each one book, and the twelve minor prophets are one more.

Three differences stand out. Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which Christian Bibles call history, are counted among the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel and Lamentations are among the Writings, not the Prophets. And the order differs at the end: a Protestant or Catholic Old Testament closes with Malachi, while printed Hebrew Bibles usually close with Chronicles, though Jewish tradition never fixed the order of the Writings.

The New Testament names the Scriptures in parts, too. In Luke’s Gospel, the risen Jesus tells his disciples:

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you, that all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled.”

Luke 24:44, World English Bible

How Catholic, Orthodox and Ethiopian Bibles sort their books

Bibles with more than 66 books are grouped the same way, with their additional books filed where they fit; in every canon counted here, those books are in the Old Testament. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, meaning “of the second canon”, a term Orthodox churches use as well; Protestants generally call them the Apocrypha.

In a Catholic Bible, Tobit and Judith follow Nehemiah, then come Esther and 1 and 2 Maccabees, all among the historical books; Wisdom and Sirach close the Wisdom books; and Baruch follows Lamentations among the Prophets. Esther and Daniel are read with their Greek additions, so both are longer.

The wider canons go further. Bibles that print the Apocrypha, as the 1611 King James Bible did and Anglican Bibles typically do, add 1 and 2 Esdras (we file both with History) and the Prayer of Manasseh (with Wisdom). The Orthodox canon adds 3 Maccabees to History and Psalm 151 to the Psalms, and we count 4 Maccabees with History too, which Greek Orthodox Bibles print in an appendix. For the Ethiopian Bible we put Jubilees (a retelling of Genesis) with the Law, Enoch and 4 Baruch with the Prophets, and the three books of Meqabyan with History. Despite the name, the Meqabyan are different books from the Maccabees, which our Ethiopian count does not include. The Ethiopian placements are ours, made to keep each book beside the ones it most resembles. Here is what each canon’s Old Testament comes to by division, in books and then chapters, by our count:

Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant Bibles explains how the two came to differ by seven books, and the one on the Ethiopian Bible covers the widest canon of all.

Using the divisions when you read

The divisions are most useful as a map of what you have read and what is still waiting. They are uneven, and that shapes any read-through. Reading in printed order means 929 Old Testament chapters before Matthew, with the Prophets the last of them. A few ways to use the shelves instead:

• Pair long chapters with short ones. A chapter of History and a psalm come to about a thousand words, four or five minutes of reading.
• Read a small book whole. Most of the minor prophets and most of the letters take under 20 minutes, so a single sitting covers a book from its first verse to its last.
• Give the Prophets a season of their own. At three chapters a day, all 250 take under three months.
• Read both testaments side by side. Some of each testament every day keeps the long stretches of law and history from arriving all at once. Our guide to the best order to read the Bible compares the main routes.

However you shelve them, the books stay the same size. Knowing which shelf a book sits on mostly tells you what kind of reading it will be, and that is enough to choose the next one.

Questions people ask

Why do some lists give five sections of the Old Testament instead of four?

Some lists split the Prophets in two, giving the Law, History, Poetry, the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel; the minor prophets are the twelve shorter books from Hosea to Malachi. The books and their order are the same either way; only the headings differ.

Is Daniel one of the books of the prophets?

In Christian Bibles, yes. Daniel sits among the major prophets, after Ezekiel. The Hebrew Bible files it differently, among the Writings beside Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles rather than among the Prophets, and it puts Lamentations among the Writings too. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles read Daniel with its Greek additions, which by our count makes it 14 chapters instead of 12.

How many letters are in the New Testament?

Twenty-one. Thirteen carry Paul's name, from Romans to Philemon; Hebrews does not name its author; and seven are the general letters, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. Together they have 121 chapters, about a tenth of the chapters in the 66-book Bible, and take about four hours to read silently.

What is the difference between the Torah and the Pentateuch?

As names for the first five books, nothing. Both mean Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Torah is the Hebrew name, meaning instruction or teaching as well as law, and in Jewish use it can also stand for the whole of Jewish teaching; Pentateuch comes from Greek, for five scrolls. Christian Bibles often call the same books the Law, and they are also known as the Five Books of Moses.

Which division of the Bible is the largest?

In the 66-book Protestant Bible, the Prophets have the most chapters, 250, just ahead of History with 249 and Wisdom with 243. By words History is the largest by a distance, about 191,000 in the World English Bible and a quarter of the whole, against 156,000 for the Prophets and 81,000 for Wisdom, whose many short psalms keep its chapters brief. In a Catholic Bible, History leads on both counts, with 316 chapters.

Sources

1. Hebrew Bible, Wikipedia
2. Ketuvim, Wikipedia
3. Torah, Wikipedia
4. Poetic Books, Wikipedia
5. Major prophet, Wikipedia
6. Minor prophets, Wikipedia
7. Synoptic Gospels, Wikipedia
8. Acts of the Apostles, Wikipedia
9. Pauline epistles, Wikipedia
10. Catholic epistles, Wikipedia
11. Book of Revelation, Wikipedia
12. Deuterocanonical books, Wikipedia
13. Catholic Bible, Wikipedia
14. Meqabyan, Wikipedia
15. Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
16. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
17. King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org