Published 2026-11-01 · 5 min read
How many times is heaven mentioned in the Bible?
The word “heaven” appears 583 times in 551 verses of the King James Bible. Counting “heavens” (133) and “heavenly” (23) too gives 739 in 691 verses. It is first in Genesis 1:1 and most frequent in Matthew.
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.
| Form | Occurrences | Verses | In the headline |
|---|---|---|---|
| heaven | 583 | 551 | yes |
| heavens | 133 | 127 | no |
| heavenly | 23 | 22 | no |
| Headline total | 583 | 551 |
Verse totals cannot be added across rows: one verse can contain more than one form.
“Kingdom of heaven” and “kingdom of God”
“Kingdom of heaven” appears 33 times, all in Matthew; Mark, Luke and John say “kingdom of God”, which appears 70 times in the New Testament. Each “kingdom of heaven” is already inside the 583. “Paradise” is a separate word, 3 times (Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 12:4, Revelation 2:7).
“Heaven” in the KJV is also the sky. “The fowls of the heaven” and “the stars of heaven” are counted the same way as the dwelling of God: a word count cannot tell the senses apart.
Old Testament, New Testament and each book
| Testament | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| Old Testament | 327 | 313 |
| New Testament | 256 | 238 |
| Book (KJV) | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| Matthew | 77 | 69 |
| Revelation | 56 | 54 |
| Deuteronomy | 38 | 34 |
| Psalms | 38 | 38 |
| Daniel | 32 | 31 |
| Luke | 31 | 29 |
| Genesis | 30 | 29 |
| Jeremiah | 24 | 24 |
| Acts | 24 | 22 |
| 2 Chronicles | 23 | 21 |
Show the other 41 books with at least one match
| Book (KJV) | Occurrences | Verses |
|---|---|---|
| John | 19 | 16 |
| Mark | 17 | 16 |
| 1 Kings | 16 | 15 |
| 2 Kings | 16 | 14 |
| Job | 15 | 15 |
| Exodus | 14 | 14 |
| Nehemiah | 13 | 11 |
| Isaiah | 11 | 11 |
| Ezra | 9 | 8 |
| Ezekiel | 8 | 8 |
| Colossians | 5 | 5 |
| Hebrews | 5 | 5 |
| Joshua | 4 | 4 |
| 2 Samuel | 4 | 4 |
| Ecclesiastes | 4 | 4 |
| Judges | 3 | 3 |
| 1 Chronicles | 3 | 3 |
| Proverbs | 3 | 3 |
| Lamentations | 3 | 3 |
| Hosea | 3 | 3 |
| Ephesians | 3 | 3 |
| 1 Peter | 3 | 3 |
| 1 Samuel | 2 | 2 |
| Amos | 2 | 2 |
| Zephaniah | 2 | 2 |
| Zechariah | 2 | 2 |
| Romans | 2 | 2 |
| 1 Corinthians | 2 | 2 |
| 2 Corinthians | 2 | 2 |
| Philippians | 2 | 2 |
| 1 Thessalonians | 2 | 2 |
| James | 2 | 2 |
| Leviticus | 1 | 1 |
| Jonah | 1 | 1 |
| Nahum | 1 | 1 |
| Haggai | 1 | 1 |
| Malachi | 1 | 1 |
| Galatians | 1 | 1 |
| 2 Thessalonians | 1 | 1 |
| 2 Peter | 1 | 1 |
| 1 John | 1 | 1 |
First: Genesis 1:1. Last: Revelation 21:10. The most in one verse is 3, in Deuteronomy 4:19, Nehemiah 9:6, Matthew 16:19, John 3:13, Acts 1:11. 15 of the 66 books have no match.
Check the count yourself
Open heaven-count-audit.csv in a spreadsheet: 691 rows plus a header, one for every verse containing a counted form. The headline_occurrences column sums to 583 (=SUM over it) and has 551 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.
Read next
Other word counts: Satan, angels, fasting, forgiveness, Jesus, God and love.