Published 2026-11-01 · 5 min read

How many times is forgiveness mentioned in the Bible?

Published by Jeff Song, who runs TrustBible · Written with AI assistance

Forgiving is mentioned 123 times in 105 verses of the King James Bible, counting forgive (56), forgiven (42), forgave, forgiveness and four other forms. The noun “forgiveness” itself appears only 7 times. Luke has the most uses.

Download the per-verse CSV to check every match yourself. The method file (JSON) lists the rule, the source hash and every result.

How we counted

Rule: whole word, any case, in the verse text of our King James Version file. A letter, digit, underscore or hyphen next to the match disqualifies it, so a form never matches inside a longer word; possessives such as “’s” stay in. An occurrence is one match; a verse counts once however many matches it holds. This is the same rule as our Bible word counter.

Verse totals cannot be added across rows: one verse can contain more than one form.

Where the noun “forgiveness” appears

“Forgiveness” appears 7 times, plus “forgivenesses” once (Daniel 9:9). The verses are Psalms 130:4, Mark 3:29, Acts 5:31, Acts 13:38, Acts 26:18, Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:14. Most of the time the Bible uses the verb: “forgive” and “forgiven” make up 98 of the 123.

Related words are counted separately: “pardon” 16 times, “pardoned” 3 times and “remission” 10 times. They are not added to the headline.

If you are looking for help forgiving someone rather than a count, read What does the Bible say about forgiveness?

Old Testament, New Testament and each book

First: Genesis 50:17. Last: 1 John 2:12. The most in one verse is 5, in 2 Corinthians 2:10. 42 of the 66 books have no match.

Every verse

All 105 verses in Bible order; a number in brackets is a verse with more than one use. Each link opens the verse in the KJV reader.

Genesis 50:17 (2), Exodus 10:17, Exodus 32:32, Exodus 34:7, Leviticus 4:20, Leviticus 4:26, Leviticus 4:31, Leviticus 4:35, Leviticus 5:10, Leviticus 5:13, Leviticus 5:16, Leviticus 5:18, Leviticus 6:7, Leviticus 19:22, Numbers 14:18, Numbers 14:19, Numbers 15:25, Numbers 15:26, Numbers 15:28, Numbers 30:5, Numbers 30:8, Numbers 30:12, Deuteronomy 21:8, Joshua 24:19, 1 Samuel 25:28, 1 Kings 8:30, 1 Kings 8:34, 1 Kings 8:36, 1 Kings 8:39, 1 Kings 8:50, 2 Chronicles 6:21, 2 Chronicles 6:25, 2 Chronicles 6:27, 2 Chronicles 6:30, 2 Chronicles 6:39, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Psalms 25:18, Psalms 32:1, Psalms 32:5, Psalms 78:38, Psalms 85:2, Psalms 86:5, Psalms 99:8, Psalms 103:3, Psalms 130:4, Isaiah 2:9, Isaiah 33:24, Jeremiah 18:23, Jeremiah 31:34, Jeremiah 36:3, Daniel 9:9, Daniel 9:19, Amos 7:2, Matthew 6:12 (2), Matthew 6:14 (2), Matthew 6:15 (2), Matthew 9:2, Matthew 9:5, Matthew 9:6, Matthew 12:31 (2), Matthew 12:32 (2), Matthew 18:21, Matthew 18:27, Matthew 18:32, Matthew 18:35, Mark 2:5, Mark 2:7, Mark 2:9, Mark 2:10, Mark 3:28, Mark 3:29, Mark 4:12, Mark 11:25 (2), Mark 11:26 (2), Luke 5:20, Luke 5:21, Luke 5:23, Luke 5:24, Luke 6:37 (2), Luke 7:42, Luke 7:43, Luke 7:47 (2), Luke 7:48, Luke 7:49, Luke 11:4 (2), Luke 12:10 (2), Luke 17:3, Luke 17:4, Luke 23:34, Acts 5:31, Acts 8:22, Acts 13:38, Acts 26:18, Romans 4:7, 2 Corinthians 2:7, 2 Corinthians 2:10 (5), 2 Corinthians 12:13, Ephesians 1:7, Ephesians 4:32 (2), Colossians 1:14, Colossians 2:13, Colossians 3:13 (2), James 5:15, 1 John 1:9, 1 John 2:12

Check the count yourself

Open forgiveness-count-audit.csv in a spreadsheet: 105 rows plus a header, one for every verse containing a counted form. The headline_occurrences column sums to 123 (=SUM over it) and has 105 non-zero rows (=COUNTIF(range,">0")). The context_url column opens each verse.

Or recount from scratch. Download count-words.py and run it with Python 3:

python count-words.py --output-dir results

It uses only Python’s standard library, downloads the pinned KJV file, checks its SHA-256 (0c3b8afefa4efaa8bd72576682c8ad060e4ccb499e81943a9678de49ab9416ad) and writes every CSV and the method JSON. The KJV text was imported from aruljohn/Bible-kjv; its exact printing is unknown. Only verse text is counted: no headings, notes or Apocrypha.

To count another word with the same rule, use the Bible word counter.

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