Chapters and verses of the Bible

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Gospel according to John – a text showing chapter and verse divisions (King James Version
)
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Chapter and verse divisions did not appear in the original texts of Jewish or Christian bibles; such divisions form part of the

9, and sometimes there is more than one sentence in a single verse, as in the case of Genesis 1:2
.

The Jewish divisions of the

Christians. For instance, Jewish tradition regards the ascriptions to many Psalms as independent verses or as parts of the subsequent verses, whereas established Christian practice treats each Psalm ascription as independent and unnumbered, resulting in 116 more verses in Jewish versions than in the Christian texts. Some chapter divisions also occur in different places, e.g. Hebrew Bibles have 1 Chronicles 5:27–41[2] where Christian translations have 1 Chronicles 6:1–15.[3][4]

History

Isaiah 2:4 KJV (Bible verse across the street from the United Nations Building in New York City
)

Chapters

Early manuscripts of the biblical texts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers. In antiquity Hebrew texts were divided into paragraphs (

Masoretic divisions.[6]

The

Eusebius of Caesarea divided the gospels into parts that he listed in tables or canons. Neither of these systems corresponds with modern chapter divisions.[7]
(See fuller discussions below.)

Chapter divisions, with titles, are also found in the 9th-century Tours manuscript Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Lat. 3, the so-called Bible of Rorigo.[8]

Cardinal archbishop

Hugo de Sancto Caro developed different schemas for systematic division of the Bible in the early 13th century. It is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based.[9][10][11]

While chapter divisions have become nearly universal, editions of the Bible have sometimes been published without them. Such editions, which typically use thematic or literary criteria to divide the biblical books instead, include

Crossway Books
.

Verses

Isaiah chapter 40, verse 8 in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German, with the verse analysed word-by-word. In English, this verse is translated "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever." (from Elias Hutter, 1602)

Since at least 916 the

sof passuq, symbol for a period or sentence break, resembling the colon (:) of English and Latin orthography. With the advent of the printing press and the translation of the Hebrew Bible into English, versifications were made that correspond predominantly with the existing Hebrew sentence breaks, with a few isolated exceptions. Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440.[10]

The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was the Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santes Pagnino (1470–1541), but his system was never widely adopted.[19] His verse divisions in the New Testament were far longer than those known today.[20] The Parisian printer Robert Estienne created another numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament,[21] which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French. Estienne's system of division was widely adopted, and it is this system which is found in almost all modern Bibles. Estienne produced a 1555 Vulgate that is the first Bible to include the verse numbers integrated into the text. Before this work, they were printed in the margins.[20]

The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524–1579). The first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published shortly afterwards by Sir Rowland Hill[22] in 1560. These verse divisions soon gained acceptance as a standard way to notate verses, and have since been used in nearly all English Bibles and the vast majority of those in other languages.

Jewish tradition

Main article: Hebrew Bible

The Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible notes several different kinds of subdivisions within the biblical books:

Passukim

Most important are the verses, or passukim (MH spelling; now pronounced pesukim by all speakers). According to Talmudic tradition, the division of the text into verses is of ancient origin.[23] In Masoretic versions of the Bible, the end of a verse, or sof passuk, is indicated by a small mark in its final word called a silluq (which means "stop"). Less formally, verse endings are usually also indicated by two vertical dots following the word with a silluq.

Parashot

The Masoretic Text also contains sections, or portions, called parashot or parashiyot. The end of a parashah is usually indicated by a space within a line (a "closed" section) or a new line beginning (an "open" section). The division of the text reflected in the parashot is usually thematic. Unlike chapters, the parashot are not numbered, but some of them have special titles.

In early manuscripts (most importantly in

Aleppo codex
), an "open" section may also be represented by a blank line, and a "closed" section by a new line that is slightly indented (the preceding line may also not be full). These latter conventions are no longer used in Torah scrolls and printed Hebrew Bibles. In this system, the one rule differentiating "open" and "closed" sections is that "open" sections must always start at the beginning of a new line, while "closed" sections never start at the beginning of a new line.

Sedarim

Another division of the biblical books found in the Masoretic Text is the division into sedarim. This division is not thematic, but is almost entirely based upon the quantity of text.[citation needed] For the Torah, this division reflects the triennial cycle of reading that was practiced by the Jews of the Land of Israel.[citation needed]

Christian versions

During the

East Roman (Byzantine) era, the church also introduced a concept roughly similar to chapter divisions, called kephalaia (singular kephalaion, literally meaning heading).[24] This system, which was in place no later than the 5th century, is not identical to the present chapters. Unlike the modern chapters, which tend to be of roughly similar length, the distance from one kephalaion mark to the next varied greatly in length both within a book and from one book to the next. For example, the Sermon on the Mount, comprising three chapters in the modern system, has but one kephalaion mark, while the single modern chapter 8 of the Gospel of Matthew has several, one per miracle. Moreover, there were far fewer kephalaia in the Gospel of John than in the Gospel of Mark
, even though the latter is the shorter text. In the manuscripts, the kephalaia with their numbers, their standard titles (titloi) and their page numbers would be listed at the beginning of each biblical book; in the book's main body, they would be marked only with arrow-shaped or asterisk-like symbols in the margin, not in the text itself.

The titles usually referred to the first event or the first theological point of the section only, and some kephalaia are manifestly incomplete if one stops reading at the point where the next kephalaion begins (for example, the combined accounts of the miracles of the

healing of the woman with a haemorrhage
gets two marked kephalaia, one titled of the daughter of the synagogue ruler at the beginning when the ruler approaches Jesus and one titled of the woman with the flow of blood where the woman enters the picture – well before the ruler's daughter is healed and the storyline of the previous kephalaion is thus properly concluded). Thus the kephalaia marks are rather more like a system of bookmarks or links into a continuous text, helping a reader to quickly find one of several well-known episodes, than like a true system of chapter divisions.

Cardinal

Latin Vulgate into chapters in the real sense, but it is the arrangement of his contemporary and fellow cardinal Stephen Langton who in 1205 created the chapter divisions which are used today. They were then inserted into Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in the 16th century. Robert Estienne (Robert Stephanus) was the first to number the verses within each chapter, his verse numbers entering printed editions in 1551 (New Testament) and 1553 (Hebrew Bible).[25]

The division of the Bible into chapters and verses has received criticism from some traditionalists and modern scholars. Critics state that the text is often divided in an incoherent way, or at inappropriate rhetorical points, and that it encourages citing passages out of context. Nevertheless, the chapter and verse numbers have become indispensable as technical references for Bible study.

Several modern publications of the Bible have eliminated numbering of chapters and verses.

ESV Reader's Bible and Bibliotheca published a modified ASV.[26] Projects such as Icthus[27]
also exist which strip chapter and verse numbers from existing translations.

Bible statistics

The number of words can vary depending upon aspects such as whether the Hebrew alphabet in Psalm 119, the superscriptions listed in some of the Psalms, and the subscripts traditionally found at the end of the Pauline epistles, are included.

Except where stated, the following apply to the

protocanonical Old Testament, not the deuterocanonical books
.

Chapters
Old Testament – 929 chapters[29]
Book / Division Chapters
Pentateuch (or the Law) 187
Genesis 50
Exodus 40
Leviticus
 27
Numbers 36
Deuteronomy
 34
Historical Books 249
Joshua 24
Judges 21
Ruth 4
1 Samuel
 31
2 Samuel
 24
1 Kings
 22
2 Kings
 25
1 Chronicles
 29
2 Chronicles
 36
Ezra 10
Nehemiah 13
Esther 10
Books of Wisdom (or "Poetry") 243
Job 42
Psalms
 150
Proverbs 31
Ecclesiastes 12
Song of Solomon
 8
Major Prophets 183
Isaiah 66
Jeremiah 52
Lamentations 5
Ezekiel 48
Daniel 12
Minor Prophets 67
Hosea 14
Joel 3
Amos 9
Obadiah 1
Jonah 4
Micah 7
Nahum 3
Habakkuk 3
Zephaniah 3
Haggai 2
Zechariah 14
Malachi 4
New Testament – 260 chapters[29]
Book / Division Chapters
Gospels 89
Matthew 28
Mark 16
Luke 24
John
 21
History 28
Acts
 28
Pauline Epistles 87
Romans 16
1 Corinthians
 16
2 Corinthians
 13
Galatians 6
Ephesians
 6
Philippians
 4
Colossians
 4
1 Thessalonians
 5
2 Thessalonians
 3
1 Timothy
 6
2 Timothy
 4
Titus 3
Philemon 1
General Epistles 34
Hebrews 13
James 5
1 Peter
 5
2 Peter
 3
1 John
 5
2 John
 1
3 John
 1
Jude 1
Apocalyptic Writings

(Prophecy)

22
Revelation 22

Verses

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "What is the longest verse in the Bible? :: Got Questions Ministries". www.compellingtruth.org.
  2. ^ 1 Chronicles 5:27–41
  3. ^ 1 Chronicles 6:1–15
  4. ^ Footnote to 1 Chronicles 6:1
  5. ^ Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 20.
  6. ^ a b Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, n. 28.
  7. ^ Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), pp. 252 ff.
  8. ^ Consortium, Europeana Regia. "Europeana Regia - Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France MSS Latin 3".
  9. ^ "CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Hebrew Bible". www.newadvent.org. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  10. ^ a b Moore, G.F. The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible, pages 73–78 at JSTOR. page 75
  11. ^ Metzger, Bruce M. (1977). The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission and Limitations. Oxford University Press. p. 347. Cited in Stephen Langton and the modern chapter divisions of the bible. Translated by Pearse, Roger. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
  12. ^ London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1707
  13. ^ 1826; repr. Nashville: Gospel Advocate Restoration Reprints, 2001
  14. ^ New York: Macmillan, 1907
  15. ^ New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936
  16. ^ "Bibliotheca Multivolume Readers' Bible Homepage". BIBLIOTHECA. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
  17. ^ "The Bible's a mess, but a designer is fixing it". The Verge. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
  18. ISBN 9781433544125
    .
  19. ISBN 1-56148-414-8
    .
  20. ^ a b "Pitts Theology Library Exhibit on the Verses of the New Testament".
  21. ^ "Bible Study Magazine". Word by Word. pp. 46–47. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  22. ^ The Holy Bible ... With a General Introduction and Short Explanatory Notes, by B. Boothroyd. James Duncan. 1836.
  23. ^ Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b
  24. ^ Snapp, James (15 April 2016). "Kephalaia: The Ancient Chapters of the Gospels". Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  25. ^ "Oxford Reference".
  26. ^ Zylstra, Sarah Eekhof (25 July 2014). "Introducing the Bible! Now with Less!". Christianity Today. Retrieved 23 August 2014.
  27. ^ "Icthus". Icthus.
  28. ^ The Center of the Bible Archived August 28, 2005, at the Wayback Machine at Break The Chain.
  29. ^ a b c "The 66 Books of the Bible - Study Resources". Blue Letter Bible. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  30. ^ John 11:35
  31. ^ Job 3:2
  32. ^ Luke 20:30
  33. ^ 1 Thessalonians 5:16
  34. ^ Walvoord, John. "First Thessalonians 5:12–28". Bible.org.
  35. Westcott-Hort
    New Testament.
  36. ^ 1 Chronicles 1:24
  37. ^ "1 Chronicles" (PDF). A New English Translation of the Septuagint.
  38. ^ "Read the Bible text :: academic-bible.com". www.academic-bible.com.
  39. ^ 1 Kings 12:24
  40. ^ "3 Kings" (PDF). A New English Translation of the Septuagint.
  41. ^ "Read the Bible text :: academic-bible.com". www.academic-bible.com.
  42. ^ Isaiah 10:8
  43. ^ "Isaias 10". LatinVulgate.com.
  44. ^ Esther 8:9
  45. ^ Exodus 20
  46. ^ Deuteronomy 5:17
  47. ^ "Read the Bible text :: academic-bible.com". www.academic-bible.com. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  48. ^ "Read the Bible text: academic-bible.com". www.academic-bible.com. Retrieved 2023-05-09.
  49. ^ John 11:25
  50. ^ "Funeral Quotes from the Bible".

External links

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