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- Older Than Feudalism: The Bible tends to be printed on special thin paper to allow it to be read without divine intervention.
- Full-text indexes of the Bible (called concordances) are also printed. The best known may be Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (for the KJV). One recent edition runs 1824 pages.
- The Jewish Publication Society's Hebrew-English study edition of the Tanakh (Jewish Bible) clocks in at 2038 pages, including an introduction and copious footnotes in both languages.
- Christianity does not unanimously agree on how long the Bible should be. Although all major groups (Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy and Protestantism) unanimously agree on the 27 books of the New Testament, each group has a differing number of Old Testament books.
- The most common version, those used by Protestants, is already at 1000 pages, and even KJV with Apocrypha is at a whopping 1600 pages.
- The Catholic Church keep the original canon as used according to their traditions and thus have "more" booksnote , and the NABRE (a popular translation) clocks in at 1552 pages.
- The various Orthodox Churches have differing canons, meaning each region has a uniquely large Bible. For example, the Ethiopian Canon has a whopping 81 books, including books that not even the other Orthodox churches recognize. note However, the Orthodox Study Bible, released in 2008, contains most of the books Orthodox Christians agree are canonical and is a very short 1856 pages.
- In December 2023, Covenant Press published The 120-Book Holy Bible and Apocrypha Collection containing the core 66 books of the Bible plus 54 books of the Apocrypha (which are all the apocryphal books that both Catholics and Orthodox recognize as canon). The description page
for the book claims it is "the longest single-volume published book in the world at over 1.5 million words, exceeding even the Guinness World Record holder À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust at 1.3 million words."
- Try the LDS "quad" (a single volume containing The Bible, The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price - all these collectively known as the "Standard Works"). What with footnote helps, the Bible clocks in at 1590 pages, the Book of Mormon at 531, the D&C at 294, and the PGP at 61. Add in the Topical Guide, Bible Dictionary, Index, maps, Joseph Smith translation, title pages for each contained work, prefatory material, etc., and you're now up to 3820 pages total in one volume on thin paper.
- The "family Bibles", massive volumes that are lavishly illustrated, bound, annotated, supplemented and printed on thick vellum paper. They are intended as coffee table show pieces, and can probably serve as the table in a pinch.
- Played for laughs in My Name Is Earl, where one of Earl's victims forgives him for getting him sent to prison because he found religion while in there, but the victim's mother refuses to forgive, and knocks Earl out with a whack on the back of his head from a Large Print edition family Bible (really large print—about three words per page) that is thicker than it is wide.
- There are also "pulpit Bibles", printed in large type for the benefit of people reading aloud from them. These also have pages that are larger than those for standard Bibles, and remain doorstoppers.
- While on the topic of The Bible: Commentaries. Some are fairly reasonable, but others, like the commentaries written by early and medieval theologians, will usually be many times longer than the passage being commented on. For example, a commentary on say, Ephesians, which is maybe 5-7 pages long depending on the printing, can easily consist of multiple volumes, each being hundreds of pages long in tiny font with no text breaks. One of the early commentaries is the Catena Aurea, a collection of passages from various Fathers of the Church commenting on the Gospels verse by verse, by St Thomas Aquinas. One edition is four volumes long.
- One of the most famous bible commentaries is the International Critical Commentary. It's 53 volumes long. Honorable mention goes to Church Dogmatics, not only is it over 9000 pages long in the original German, it is also all written by one man, Karl Barth.
- Take a Catholic Bible, design it for family, include commentaries, and traditional engraved wooden covering, and you have the Haydock bible, such as the one used by Joe Biden, while the modern reprint is like a Phonebook.
- The Codex Gigas ("Giant Book") is a compilation of the Vulgate Bible, an encyclopaedia by St. Isidore, several history books (some by Josephus), and a lot of other manuscripts, hand-written in the 13th century by a single scribe over a period of 20 years. It's over a yard tall and eight inches thick, and weighs 166 lbs. Doorstopper? This thing could be the door. note
- Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, a compendium of Catholic doctrine, is often published in five volumes with at least 3000 pages of content. Some editions of the original Latin can be as long as 13 volumes.
- In comparison, the Catechism of Catholic Church, 1995 edition, can be had as a mass-market paperback, while the older Collection of Dogmas and Catechism, though each will be in its own book, are the size of phone books.
- The Talmud uses quite a few meters of space in your library, especially in its now-standard "Babylonian" version. Well, it's essentially a commentary on every commandment in the Bible (all 613 of them), and including the arguments that many, MANY sages had over them. The Vilna edition of the Talmud weighs in at 5,894 folio pages.
- A Yom Kippur prayer-book can be in excess of a thousand pages.
- And Mikraot Gdolot (literally "big/expanded Scripture") This contains the Hebrew scriptures, a translation/gloss into Aramaic, and lots of commentaries, with later commentaries sometimes commenting on earlier commentaries. A word or phrase that occasions much discussion may be the only Biblical text on that page, and sometimes on several pages to follow. The versions with the *fewest* commentaries require five substantial volumes.
- The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are very long epics. Mahabharata itself has a total of 1.8 million words, one hundred thousand poems, and long, long prose passages. Ramayana, in comparison, has "only" 24,000 stanzas.
- The Granth, the holy book of Sikhism, by tradition, is printed in lavishly-decorated volumes that are about the size of a coffee table.
- The Pali canon, which forms the doctrinal core of Theravada Buddhism, runs anywhere between 40 and 60 volumes, depending on translation and how much commentary is included. As if that weren't enough, it was only first written down centuries after Buddhism began - before that, it was transmitted orally by chanting monks.
- The latest edition of the Avatamsaka Sutra is 1,656 pages long.
- Arcana Coelestia, which is essentially Emmanuel Swedenborg putting together a new religion on top of Christianity, covers the books of Genesis and Exodus. Alone. It's eight Doorstoppers long.
- The Urantia Book, a collection of "papers" about the nature and history of the universe, God and Earth ("Urantia" is an alternate name for Earth), allegedly channeled from extraterrestrials and published in 1955 (which has a sect devoted to it), clocks in at 2,097 pages.
- Islam:
- Most hadith collections. One translation of Sahih Muslim, the second most authoritative of the Kutub al-Sittah (six hadith collections considered canon in most Sunni Islam schools), clocks in at 4,050 pages.
- Averted with The Qur'an itself. Most English translations average around 500 to 600 pages, which is shockingly short for a holy book, especially when compared to the Bible. The Qur'an is so short, it became a pastime for Muslims to read the whole thing in less than a month (29/30 days during Ramadan) an hour each night. The Qur'an is also famously laconic in content and does not like details. In fact, the Muslim community is shaped less by the Qur'an and more by the aforementioned hadiths, where the bulk of instructions, laws, history, and theology (everything from governing how you pray to the matter of afterlife) are contained.
