How Many Times Is Love Mentioned in the Bible? 311 in the KJV

In the King James translation the word “love” appears 311 times. Count loved, loveth, loves, lovest, lovedst and loving as well and there are 493. No books say it more often than John’s: counting every form, his Gospel has it 57 times and his short first letter 46.

The first time any form of the word appears, God is speaking to Abraham: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Genesis 22:2). So the Bible’s first love is a father’s love for his only son, as God sends him up a mountain. Abraham’s son was spared on Moriah. The Bible’s best-known verse goes back up that road and keeps going: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). John saw the whole story in that gift. “Herein is love,” he writes, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

Here is each form of the word in the King James Version:

Word (KJV)	Times	Where it first appears
love	311	Genesis 27:4
loved	98	Genesis 24:67
loveth	65	Genesis 27:9
lovest	12	Genesis 22:2
loving	3	Proverbs 5:19
lovedst	2	Isaiah 57:8
loves	2	Proverbs 7:18
All seven	493	Genesis 22:2

The word on its own first turns up in an old man’s request for his supper, Isaac asking for “savoury meat, such as I love” (Genesis 27:4), and three chapters earlier the same Isaac “loved” Rebekah and “was comforted after his mother’s death” (Genesis 24:67). Scripture uses one word for small loves and great ones. The last “love” in the Bible is Christ speaking to a lukewarm church: “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten” (Revelation 3:19).

Close relatives of the word are counted apart. “Beloved” comes 115 times, “charity” 28 times and “lovingkindness” 26 times, with “lovingkindnesses” 4 more. Add “lover”, “lovers” and “lovely” and the 493 becomes 524.

These counts are whole words in the King James text without the Apocrypha, and another Bible will give you other numbers. In the New International Version “love” appears 574 times in 526 verses, and in the Spanish Reina-Valera 1960 “amor” appears 227 times in 208 verses. About 70 of those Spanish uses are the phrase “por amor de” or “por amor a”, which usually means “for the sake of”, and verbs such as ama, amó and amado are not in the count. We counted both translations by reading every verse BibleGateway’s search returned and keeping only the exact word.

The NIV says “love” 263 more times than the King James, and two places explain about half of that. The first is 1 Corinthians 13. There the King James translators wrote “charity” nine times where the NIV has “love”, so their most famous lines on love never use the word: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

The second is the Psalms. The King James Psalms say “love” 23 times; the NIV Psalms say it 144 times, 121 more. The difference is mostly one Hebrew word, chesed, which Strong’s renders “kindness” and the King James Bible often translates “mercy”. Psalm 136 repeats it after every line, “for his mercy endureth for ever” (Psalm 136:1), 26 times in 26 verses. The NIV gives that refrain as “His love endures forever”, and across its whole Bible it says “unfailing love” 39 times. The Hebrew word holds kindness, mercy and love together, and each English Bible has to choose.

In the King James Version the word “love” comes most often in 1 John (33 times), the Song of Solomon (26), the Psalms (23), the Gospel of John (22), and Deuteronomy and Proverbs (16 each). The New Testament has about a third as many verses as the Old, 7,957 against 23,145, yet it says “love” more often, 180 times to 131.

1 John is the densest of all, 33 times in 105 verses, and it is the only book that says “God is love”, twice (1 John 4:8 and 4:16). The Song of Solomon gives love its strongest picture: “for love is strong as death… Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (Song of Solomon 8:6–7).

A good deal more than people expect. The commandment Jesus called the first and great one is from Deuteronomy, “thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and the second is from Leviticus, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus put the two side by side and said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:40).

The Old Testament also tells Israel why God loved them, and the answer is humbling. “The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). He loved them because he loved them. Hosea hears God speak like a parent teaching a child to walk: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him… I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love” (Hosea 11:1, 4). And Jeremiah carries the promise into exile: “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).

The usual Hebrew verb is aheb, which Strong’s defines as “to have affection for (sexually or otherwise)”. It covers Jacob’s love for Rachel, for whom seven years of work “seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her” (Genesis 29:20), and Israel’s love for God.

Mainly two. Agape, with its verb agapao, is the love of 1 Corinthians 13 and of “God is love”; Strong’s defines agape as “affection or benevolence”. Phileo is the love of friendship; Strong’s calls it personal attachment, “a matter of sentiment or feeling”, and sets it beside agapao, which embraces “the deliberate assent of the will”. Thayer’s lexicon points to John 21:15–17 to show the two words side by side, where the risen Jesus asks Peter three times, “lovest thou me?” There is more on the first word in what agape love is.

The third Greek word people mention, eros, is not in the New Testament at all. Pope Benedict XVI noted in Deus Caritas Est (2005) that the Greek Old Testament “uses the word eros only twice, while the New Testament does not use it at all”. The apostles reached for agape, a rarer word in their day, and filled it with what they had seen at the cross.

Scripture’s shortest answer is a name: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Its fullest answer is a deed. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us,” John writes, and he carries it straight on to us: “and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). Love in the Bible is first something God does, and then something we do because he did it. “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18).

Paul shows what that love looks like from day to day. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up” (1 Corinthians 13:4), and “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Love comes first in the fruit of the Spirit, “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith” (Galatians 5:22), and it holds the other virtues together: “above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness” (Colossians 3:14).

Jesus gave it to his friends as a new commandment, “That ye love one another; as I have loved you” (John 13:34), and made it the mark of the people who belong to him: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). Marriage is measured by the same love: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The love between husband and wife has a whole book of its own in the Song of Solomon.

John 3:16 is the one most people know by heart. Close behind come Paul’s lines on love in 1 Corinthians 13, which we look at more closely in the definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13, and Jesus’ words on the night before he died, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Paul says the same of the cross: “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). More of these verses are gathered in 19 Bible verses about love.

Each of them points back to the gift John wrote about, the Father who gave his Son. That is the love we did not start and cannot earn. It reached us first, and everything we manage to give back begins there. John put it in seven words: “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

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