Chapter and verse divisions did not appear in the original texts of Jewish or Christian bibles; such divisions form part of the

paratext In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text (e.g., the story, non-fiction description, poems, etc.) supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the ma ...

of the

Bible The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...

. Since the early 13th century, most copies and editions of the Bible have presented all but the shortest of the scriptural books with divisions into

chapters Chapter or Chapters may refer to: Books * Chapter (books), a main division of a piece of writing or document * Chapter book, a story book intended for intermediate readers, generally age 7–10 * Chapters (bookstore), Canadian big box bookstore ...

, generally a page or so in length. Since the mid-16th century, editors have further subdivided each chapter into verses – each consisting of a few short lines or of one or more sentences. Sometimes a sentence spans more than one verse, as in the case of Ephesians 2:8– 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

Hebrew text Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until ...

differ at various points from those used by

Christian A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ. Christians form the largest religious community in the wo ...

s. For instance, Jewish tradition regards the ascriptions to many

Psalms The Book of Psalms ( , ; ; ; ; , in Islam also called Zabur, ), also known as the Psalter, is the first book of the third section of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) called ('Writings'), and a book of the Old Testament. The book is an anthology of B ...

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 Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' 1 Chronicles 5:27–41 where Christian translations have 1 Chronicles 6:1–15.

History

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 (

parashot The term ''parashah'', ''parasha'' or ''parashat'' ( ''Pārāšâ'', "portion", Tiberian , Sephardi , plural: ''parashot'' or ''parashiyot'', also called ''parsha'') formally means a section of a biblical book in the Masoretic Text of the Tana ...

) that were identified by two letters of the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably ...

. Peh (פ‎) indicated an "open" paragraph that began on a new line, while Samekh (ס‎) indicated a "closed" paragraph that began on the same line after a small space. These two letters begin the Hebrew words open () and closed (), and are, themselves, open in shape (פ) and closed (ס). The earliest known copies of the

Book of Isaiah The Book of Isaiah ( ) is the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. It is identified by a superscription as the words of the 8th-century BC prophet Isaiah ben Amo ...

from the

Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of List of Hebrew Bible manuscripts, ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE). They were discovered over a period of ten years, between ...

used parashot divisions, although they differ slightly from the

Masoretic The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; ) is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (''Tanakh'') in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocaliz ...

divisions.Würthwein, ''The Text of the Old Testament'', n. 28. The

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' Torah The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () ...

(its first five books) were divided into 154 sections so that they could be read through aloud in weekly worship over the course of three years. In Babylonia, it was divided into 53 or 54 sections (

Parashat ha-Shavua The weekly Torah portion refers to a lectionary custom in Judaism in which a portion of the Torah (or Pentateuch) is read during Jewish prayer services on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. The full name, ''Parashat HaShavua'' (), is popularly abbre ...

) so it could be read through in one year. The

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

was divided into topical sections known as kephalaia by the fourth century.

Eusebius of Caesarea Eusebius of Caesarea (30 May AD 339), also known as Eusebius Pamphilius, was a historian of Christianity, exegete, and Christian polemicist from the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. In about AD 314 he became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima. ...

divided the gospels into parts that he listed in tables or ''canons''. Neither of these systems corresponds with modern chapter divisions. (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. Cardinal archbishop

Stephen Langton Stephen Langton (c. 1150 – 9 July 1228) was an English Cardinal (Catholic Church), cardinal of the Catholic Church and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 until his death in 1228. The dispute between list of English kings, King John of E ...

and Cardinal 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. 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 John Locke's ''Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul'' (1707), Alexander Campbell's ''The Sacred Writings'' (1826), Daniel Berkeley Updike's fourteen-volume ''The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha,'' Richard Moulton's ''The Modern Reader's Bible'' (1907), Ernest Sutherland Bates's ''The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature'' (1936), ''

The Books of the Bible ''The Books of the Bible'' is the first presentation of an unabridged committee translation of the Bible to remove chapter and verse numbers entirely and instead present the biblical books according to their natural literary structures. This ed ...

'' (2007) from the

International Bible Society Biblica, formerly International Bible Society, was founded in 1809 and is the worldwide copyright holder of the New International Version of the Bible (NIV), licensing commercial rights to Zondervan in the United States and to Hodder & Stoughton ...

(

Biblica Biblica, formerly International Bible Society, was founded in 1809 and is the worldwide copyright holder of the New International Version of the Bible (NIV), licensing commercial rights to Zondervan in the United States and to Hodder & Stoughton ...

), Adam Lewis Greene's five-volume '' Bibliotheca'' (2014), and the six-volume ESV Reader's Bible (2016) from

Crossway Books Crossway (previously known by its parent ministry Good News Publishers) is a not-for-profit evangelical Christian A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on t ...

Verses

Since at least 916 the

Tanakh The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. ''

vocalization and cantillation markings. One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, 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 The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. '' Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus was a French Jewish philosopher and controversialist. He lived at Arles, perhaps at Avignon also, and in other places in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He belonged to the well-known Nathan family, which claimed ...

's work for the first Hebrew

Bible concordance A Bible concordance is a Concordance (publishing), concordance, or verbal index, to the Bible. A simple form lists Biblical words alphabetically, with indications to enable the inquirer to find the passages of the Bible where the words occur. Con ...

around 1440.Moore, G.F
The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible
pages 73–78 at

JSTOR JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...

page 75
/ref> The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was the Italian Dominican biblical scholar

Santes Pagnino Santes (or Xantes) Pagnino (Latin: Xanthus Pagninus) (1470–1536), also called Sante Pagnini or Santi Pagnini, was an Italian Dominican friar, and one of the leading philologists and Biblical scholars of his day. Biography Pagnino was born 1470 ...

(1470–1541), but his system was never widely adopted. His verse divisions in the New Testament were far longer than those known today. The Parisian printer

Robert Estienne Robert I Estienne (; 15037 September 1559), known as ''Robertus Stephanus'' in Latin and sometimes referred to as ''Robert Stephens'', was a 16th-century printer in Paris. He was the proprietor of the Estienne print shop after the death of his f ...

created another numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament, 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. The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by

William Whittingham William Whittingham (c. 1524–1579) was an English Puritan, a Marian exile, and a translator of the Geneva Bible. He was well connected to the circles around John Knox, Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin, and firmly resisted the continuance o ...

(c. 1524–1579). The first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the

Geneva Bible The Geneva Bible, sometimes known by the sobriquet Breeches Bible, is one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into English, preceding the Douay Rheims Bible by 22 years, and the King James Version by 51 years. It was ...

published shortly afterwards by Sir Rowland Hill 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

The

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; ) is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (''Tanakh'') in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocaliz ...

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

Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...

ic tradition, the division of the text into verses is of ancient origin. 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

also contains sections, or portions, called ''

'' 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 Tiberian Masoretic manuscripts, such as the

Aleppo codex The Aleppo Codex () is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. ...

), 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. For the

Torah The Torah ( , "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is also known as the Pentateuch () ...

, this division reflects the triennial cycle of reading that was practiced by the Jews of the Land of Israel.

Christian versions

Christians also introduced a concept roughly similar to chapter divisions, called ''kephalaia'' (singular ''kephalaion'', literally meaning ''heading''). Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro is often given credit for first dividing the

Latin Vulgate The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Saint Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels used by the Roman Church. Later, of his own initia ...

into chapters in the real sense, but it is the arrangement of his contemporary and fellow cardinal

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

published such a version of the NIV in 2007 and 2011. In 2014,

Crossway Crossway (previously known by its parent ministry Good News Publishers) is a not-for-profit evangelical Christian publishing ministry headquartered in Wheaton, Illinois. Clyde and Muriel Dennis founded Good News Publishers in 1938, working out o ...

published the ESV Reader's Bible and '' Bibliotheca'' published a modified ASV.

References

External links

How Many Words In Each Book of the Bible
Sortable table of data about chapters, verses, words, and other info on each Bible book

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chapters And Verses Of The Bible 13th-century introductions Referencing systems