Chapters and verses of the Bible

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The Bible is traditionally divided into 66 books for Protestants and 73 for Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Each is further divided into chapters and verses. In Protestant bibles, 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). Not including deuterocanonical books, 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, which is an average of a little more than 26 verses per chapter.

The Jewish verse divisions of the Hebrew text differ at various points from those used by Christians. For instance, in Jewish tradition, the ascriptions to the 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.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Chapters

Although some portions of the original texts were logically divided into parts following the Hebrew alphabet, the original manuscripts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the present, numbered, form that modern readers are familiar with. (This was different from the acrostic structure of certain texts following the Hebrew alphabet such as Psalm 119 and the book of Lamentations.) The earliest known copies of the book of Isaiah use letters of the Hebrew alphabet for paragraph divisions. There are other divisions from various sources which are different from what we use today.

The Old Testament began to be put into sections before the Babylonian Captivity (586 B.C.) 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 B.C.) the Law was put into 54 sections and 669 sub-divisions for reading.

Before the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the New Testament was divided into paragraphs where the divisions were different from the modern Bible.

An important canon of the New Testament was proclaimed by Pope Damasus I in the Roman synod of 374. Pope Damasus also induced Saint Jerome, a priest from Antioch, to undertake his famous translation of the entire Bible, both New Testament and Old Testament into Latin, the common language of the time. The Church continued to finance the very expensive process of copying and providing copies of the Bible to local churches and communities from that point up to and beyond the invention of the printing press, which greatly reduced the cost of producing copies of the Scriptures.

Churchmen Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro determined different schemas for systematic division of the Bible between 1227 and 1248. It is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based.

[edit] Verses

It is presently unknown how early the Hebrew verse divisions were part of the books that were later chosen as part of the Biblical canon. However, it is beyond dispute that 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. One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a full stop, or sentence break, that resembles the colon mark (:) 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.

In the New Testament, the verse divisions were first added by Robert Estienne in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament. 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.

Unlike the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the structure of the Greek language makes it highly susceptible to being broken up into divisions that would be syntactically inappropriate and even contrary to the sense of the passage. Inexact apportionment of the Greek into verses therefore could easily have obscured the intent, relation, emphasis and force of the words themselves, and thus elicited the most strenuous objections of theologians. The retention of Robert Estienne's verse divisions essentially without alteration is a tribute not only to the inherent utility of his contribution to Bible study, but also to his excellent knowledge of the scriptures and grasp of the fine points of the ancient Greek language.

[edit] Trivia

The following applies only to Protestant Bibles:

  • Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter of the Bible.
  • Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible.
  • Psalm 117 is the middle chapter of the Bible (in its Protestant form and order) being the 595th Chapter. Contrary to popular belief, it does not contain the middle verse of the Bible. [1] The King James Version has an even number of verses (31,102) [2], with the two middle verses being Psalm 103:1-2.[3]
  • John 11:35 ("Jesus wept" ) is the shortest verse in most English translations. If the text is examined in its original languages, 1 Thessalonians 5:16 has the fewest letters. Some translations—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, considering that this is a translators' condensation of the literal Hebrew ("And Job answered and said"), this is usually not considered "the shortest verse".
  • 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.

[edit] Comprehension

Versification exists as a convenience to the reader. As an aide to memorization, or as a means of finding the same lines during a discussion, versification may be useful. However, it may also lead toward the conclusion that only a few lines need be taken together in order to interpret them. The impulse to conceive of verses as independent, isolated units of meaning is strong, despite efforts on the part of Biblical scholars to discourage this.

As much as any sentence in any book, any statement in the Bible is designed to be understood in its own context. Interpretation of isolated verses often leads to misunderstandings that would be clear if the same words were studied in context.

A fortiori this applies for parts of verses. For example, an oft-quoted phrase from the Bible says: "There is no God." The complete sentence, from Psalm 14:1, reads, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" The meaning, in context, is quite different from the meaning, in isolation, of the last four words.

Some sentences in the Bible are divided across several verses. As an example, Romans 3:23 says, "for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God," in the King James Version. However, this verse is only part of a longer sentence spanning verses 22-25.

It may be tempting to assume that short quotations and quick snippets can be interpreted, applied, and utilized independently of their context. However, when the Bible was written, it was meant to be deeply pondered, sequentially studied, and fully considered.

[edit] Manuscript Study

A relatively new form of Bible study was developed and adopted by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in response to the problem described above. Manuscript study was designed to avoid the distraction of the chapter and verse divisions, and to see a much clearer connection from one passage to another within a book of the Bible. In a typical manuscript study, the chapter and verse divisions, footnotes, and paragraphing are removed, and the Biblical text is converted to a "manuscript." The manuscript is double-spaced with wide margins for note-taking. The student reads the manuscript, marking notes in the margins and between the lines and drawing connections from one section to another with a set of colored pencils. In this way, the student can see meaning in Scripture that was difficult to see before.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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