Published 2026-11-01 · 5 min read

How many times is Satan mentioned in the Bible?

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

The name “Satan” appears 56 times in 49 verses of the King James Bible: 19 in the Old Testament and 37 in the New. Job has the most (14). “Devil” and “devils” are separate words, adding 61 and 55 more.

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.

Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub: counted separately

The headline counts the name “Satan” only. Other names and titles are different words, so they have their own counts:

Not every “serpent”, “dragon” or “devils” refers to Satan, and Lucifer appears once, in Isaiah 14:12; whether that verse speaks of Satan is a matter of interpretation, not counting. Do not add these rows to the 56.

In Hebrew, satan means “adversary”. The KJV writes the name in 15 Old Testament verses: 1 Chronicles 21:1, Job 1–2, Psalms 109:6 and Zechariah 3:1–2. Elsewhere it translates the same Hebrew word as “adversary”, which this count leaves out. Every match is capitalised “Satan”; 1 is the possessive “Satan’s” (Revelation 2:13).

Old Testament, New Testament and each book

First: 1 Chronicles 21:1. Last: Revelation 20:7. The most in one verse is 2, in Job 1:7, Job 1:12, Job 2:2, Zechariah 3:2, Matthew 12:26, Mark 3:23, Revelation 2:13. 50 of the 66 books have no match.

Every verse

All 49 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.

1 Chronicles 21:1, Job 1:6, Job 1:7 (2), Job 1:8, Job 1:9, Job 1:12 (2), Job 2:1, Job 2:2 (2), Job 2:3, Job 2:4, Job 2:6, Job 2:7, Psalms 109:6, Zechariah 3:1, Zechariah 3:2 (2), Matthew 4:10, Matthew 12:26 (2), Matthew 16:23, Mark 1:13, Mark 3:23 (2), Mark 3:26, Mark 4:15, Mark 8:33, Luke 4:8, Luke 10:18, Luke 11:18, Luke 13:16, Luke 22:3, Luke 22:31, John 13:27, Acts 5:3, Acts 26:18, Romans 16:20, 1 Corinthians 5:5, 1 Corinthians 7:5, 2 Corinthians 2:11, 2 Corinthians 11:14, 2 Corinthians 12:7, 1 Thessalonians 2:18, 2 Thessalonians 2:9, 1 Timothy 1:20, 1 Timothy 5:15, Revelation 2:9, Revelation 2:13 (2), Revelation 2:24, Revelation 3:9, Revelation 12:9, Revelation 20:2, Revelation 20:7

Check the count yourself

Open satan-count-audit.csv in a spreadsheet: 49 rows plus a header, one for every verse containing a counted form. The headline_occurrences column sums to 56 (=SUM over it) and has 49 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: angels, fasting, forgiveness, heart, Jesus, God and love.