Working my way through my Chapter by Chapter notes on Jeremiah tonight, I kept thinking, These chapters are really lo...

Working my way through my Chapter by Chapter notes on Jeremiah tonight, I kept thinking, These chapters are really long! Fortunately, I had already built some Bible-data machinery for this article. So naturally, instead of getting back to my notes, I had Codex investigate. The result: my intuition was right. Mostly. Jeremiah’s chapters average about 25% more words than the average non-Jeremiah chapter, putting it 14th among the 66 books by average chapter length. Interestingly, it doesn’t have more verses per chapter than usual. Jeremiah’s verses are just longer. But Jeremiah is nowhere near the top. The average chapters in 1 Kings and Luke are roughly 35% longer than Jeremiah’s. And I’m only at the beginning. Waiting for me near the end, I discovered, are Jeremiah 50—the 22nd-longest chapter in the Bible—and Jeremiah 51, which comes in at number six out of all 1,189 chapters. What have I learned? Mostly that my intuition was real, statistics are a great form of procrastination, and…