Chapters and verses of the Bible

The Bible is a compilation of many shorter books written at different times and later assembled into the Biblical canon. All but the shortest of these books have been divided into chapters, generally a page or so in length, since the early 13th century. Since the mid-16th century, each chapter has been further divided into "verses" of a few short lines or 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. As the chapter and verse divisions were not part of the original texts, they form part of the Bible's paratext.

The Jewish divisions of the Hebrew text differ at various points from those used by Christians. For instance, in Jewish tradition, the ascriptions to many Psalms are regarded as independent verses, making 116 more verses, whereas the established Christian practice is to count and number each Psalm ascription together with the first verse following it. Some chapter divisions also occur in different places, e.g. 1 Chronicles 5:27-41 in Hebrew Bibles is numbered as 1 Chronicles 6:1-15 in Christian translations.

History

Chapters

The original manuscripts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers. Some portions of the original Hebrew texts were logically divided into parts following the Hebrew alphabet;^{[citation needed]} for instance, the earliest known copies of the Book of Isaiah use Hebrew letters for paragraph divisions. (This was different from the acrostic structure of certain texts following the Hebrew alphabet, such as Psalm 119 and most of the Book of Lamentations.) There are other divisions from various sources which are different from what we use today.

The Hebrew Bible began to be put into sections before the Babylonian Captivity (586 BC)^{[citation needed]} with the five books of Moses being put into a 154-section reading program to be used in a three-year cycle. Later (before 536 BC^{[citation needed]}) the Law was put into 54 sections and 669 sub-divisions for reading.

By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the New Testament had been divided into paragraphs, although the divisions were different from the modern Bible.^{[citation needed]}

Archbishop Stephen Langton 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.^[1][2]

Verses

For at least a thousand years the Tanakh has contained an extensive system of multiple levels of section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions that were indicated in Masoretic vocalization and cantillation markings.^{[citation needed]} One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a full stop or sentence break, resembling the colon (:) of English and Latin orthography. With the advent of the printing press and the translation of the Bible into English, Old Testament versifications were made that correspond predominantly with the existing Hebrew full stops, with a few isolated exceptions. A product of meticulous labour and unwearying attention, the Old Testament verse divisions stand today in essentially the same places as they have been passed down since antiquity. Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440.^[2]

The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541), but his system was never widely adopted.^[3] Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament ^[4] 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.

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 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: Tanakh#Chapters and verse numbers, book divisions

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

Verse endings

Most importantly are the verse endings. According to the Talmudic tradition,^[specify] the division of the text into verses is of ancient origin. In masoretic versions of the Bible, the end of a verse 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 a two horizontal dots following the word with a silluq.

Parashiyot

Main article: Parashah

The Masoretic textual tradition also contains section endings called parashot, which are 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) 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 begin 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 of the sedarim. This division is not thematic, but is almost entirely based upon the quantity of text. For the Torah, this division reflects the triennial cycle of reading that was practiced by the Jews of Babylon.

Absence of chapters

The current division of the Bible into chapters and the verse numbers within the chapters has no basis in any ancient textual tradition.^{[citation needed]} Rather, they are medieval and early modern Christian inventions. They were later adopted by many Jews as well, as technical references within the Hebrew text. Such technical references became crucial to medieval rabbis in the historical context of forced debates with Christian clergy (who used the chapter numbers), especially in late medieval Spain.^[5]

The earliest extant Jewish manuscript to note the chapter divisions dates from 1330, and the first printed edition was in 1516 (several earlier Masoretic Bibles did not note the chapters). Since then, all printed Hebrew Bibles note the chapter and verse numbers out of practical necessity. However, ever since the 1961 Koren edition, most Jewish editions of the Bible have made a systematic effort to relegate chapter and verse numbers to the margins of the text, as an indication that they are foreign to the Masoretic tradition.

Christian versions

The Byzantines also introduced a concept roughly similar to chapter divisions, called kephalaia (singular kephalaion, literally meaning heading). 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 (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) and from one book to the next (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 miracle story of the daughter of the synagogue leader and of the woman with the flow of blood 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 Hugo de Sancto Caro is often given credit for first dividing the 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 15th 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 1571 (Hebrew Bible).^[6]

The division of the Bible into chapters and verses has often elicited severe criticism from traditionalists and modern scholars alike. Critics charge 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.

Statistics

Except where stated, the following apply to the King James Version of the Bible in its modern Protestant form, including the New Testament but not the deuterocanonical books. The number of words can vary depending upon aspects, such as whether the Hebrew alphabet in Psalm 119 or the superscriptions listed in some of the Psalms and New Testament are included.

Chapters

• There are 929 chapters in the Old Testament and 260 chapters in the New Testament. This gives a total of 1,189 chapters (on average, 18 per book).
• Psalm 117 is the middle chapter of the Bible, being the 595th Chapter.^[7]
• Psalm 117 is also the shortest chapter of the Bible.
• Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible.

Verses

• There are 23,145 verses in the Old Testament and 7,957 verses in the New Testament. This gives a total of 31,102 verses,^[8] which is an average of a little more than 26 verses per chapter.
• Contrary to popular belief, Psalm 118 does not contain the middle verse of the Bible. The King James Version has an even number of verses (31,102), with the two middle verses being Psalm 103:1-2.^[9]
• 1 Chronicles 1:25 ("Eber, Peleg, Reu") is the shortest verse in the Old Testament.
• The shortest verse in the Greek New Testament is Luke 20:30 ("και ο δευτερος", "And the second") with twelve letters, according to the Westcott and Hort text. In the Textus Receptus, the shortest verse is 1 Thessalonians 5:16 ("παντοτε χαιρετε", "Rejoice always") with fourteen letters,^[10] since Stephanus' rendering of Luke 20:30 includes some additional words.^[11]
• Isaiah 10:8 ("Dicet enim") is the shortest verse in the Latin Vulgate.^[12]
• John 11:35 ("Jesus wept") is the shortest verse in most English translations. Some translations — including the New International Version, New Living Translation, New Life Version, Holman Christian Standard Bible and New International Reader's Version — render Job 3:2 as "He said". However, this is a translators' condensation of the Hebrew which literally translated is "And Job answered and said."
• Esther 8:9 is the longest verse in the Masoretic Text. The discovery of several manuscripts at Qumran (in the Dead Sea Scrolls) has reopened what is considered the most original text of 1 Samuel 11; if one believes that those manuscripts better preserve the text, several verses in 1 Samuel 11 surpass Esther 8:9 in length.
• Using numbers of pages in the CUV/ESV Bible, the New Testament comprises 22.7% of the Bible.

See also

• Bible citation
• List of omitted Bible verses
• Parashah

References

1. ^ Hebrew Bible article in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
2. ^ ^{a b} Moore, G.F. The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible at JSTOR.
3. ^ Miller, Stephen M., Huber, Robert V. (2004). The Bible: A History. Good Books. p. 173. ISBN 1561484148. 
4. ^ "Chapters and Verses: Who Needs Them?," Christopher R. Smith, Bible Study Magazine (July-Aug 2009): 46-47.
5. ^ See Spanish Inquisition.
6. ^ The Examiner.
7. ^ The Center of the Bible at BreakTheChain.org
8. ^ Number of chapters and verses in each book at BlueLetterBible.org
9. ^ King James Bible Statistics at BibleBelievers.com
10. ^ First Thessalonians 5:12-28, John Walvoord at Bible.org
11. ^ Luke 20:30, in the 1550 Stephanus New Testament and the 1881 Westcott-Hort New Testament.
12. ^ Isaias 10 at LatinVulgate.com

External links

• STEP Documentation
• OSIS Documentation
• Alternate Versification