FOUNDATIONS OF THE
DIVISIONS OF THE TEXT
Writing material and instruments were the means by which
revelation could be expressed in the media of language. However, the
ancients for the most part felt no need for dividing the text into such
smaller and meaningful units as chapters, paragraphs, or verses.
These divisions came into being much later than the time
when the Scriptures began to be preserved in written form.
There was apparently some divisions in the
autographs of the Old Testament: for example, the book of Lamentations and
Psalm 119:10 which are indicated by the use of the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. These cases are not numerous but they do reflect at least some
natural divisions in the Hebrew text.
||Palestinian sections were begun prior to the Babylonian captivity (586
B.C.), and consisted of 154 sections for the Pentateuch. These sections
were called sedarim (seder, singular), and were designed to provide
lessons sufficient to cover a three-year cycle of reading.
||Babylonian sections appeared during the
captivity (prior to 536 B.C.),' when the Torah was divided
into fifty-four sections called parashiyyoth (parashah,
singular). These were later subdivided into 669 sections for reference
These sections were utilized for a single-year cycle.
||Maccabean sections appeared during the
period at about 165 B.C.
These fifty-four sections, corresponding with the Sedarim of the Law, covered
the Prophets and were called haphtarahs.
||After the Protestant Reformation,
the Hebrew Bible for the most part followed the same chapter
divisions as the Protestant Old Testament. These divisions
were first placed in the margins in 1330.
They were printed into the text of the Complutensian Polyglot
(1517 A.D.), and the text was divided in the edition of Arias Montanus (1571
||Ancient verse indications were merely
spaces between words, as the words were run together
continuously through a given book.
Each book was separate, and there were no
vowel points until
Masoretes added them (fifth to tenth century A.D.).
After the Babylonian captivity, for the purpose of public reading and
interpretation, space stops were employed, and still later additional
markings were added.
These "verse" markings were not regulated, and
differed from place to place.
It was not until about A.D. 900 that the
markings were standardized.
||Reformation verse indications appeared
in the sixteenth century.
In the Bomberg edition (1547) every fifth verse was indicated;
in 1571 Montanus
indicated each verse in the margin for the first time.
|Old Greek Division
||The autographs of the New Testament were undoubtedly
written in an unbroken manner, similar to the Old Testament, especially since they
consisted mostly of shorter books than the gospels and Acts.
there was an early sectioning that took place, and it is commonly referred
to as the old Greek division into paragraphs (kephalaia).
These divisions appeared prior to the Council at Nicea (325), and differed
from modern chapter divisions.
||During the fourth century, the
Codex Vaticanus (B)
utilized another system of marking sections.
In total there were 170 sections in Matthew, 62 in Mark, 152 in Luke, and
50 in John.
That system is not completely known today, as the Vaticanus
manuscript is broken off at Hebrews 9:14.
As a result, only the kephalaia
markings down to that point are known.
||Another system of chapter
divisions is found in
Codex Alexandrinus (A) of the fifth century as well
as in most other Greek manuscripts. According to this capitulation in
Matthew there are 68 kephalaia, in Mark 48, in Luke 83, and in John 18.13.
||The historian Eusebius of Caesarea attempted still another means of
sectioning the New Testament.
He devised a system of short paragraphs, which he cross-referenced on a series of tables, for the gospels.
paragraphs were longer than modern verses but shorter than current
chapters. In his work, Mathew had 335 sections, Mark had 233 (later
changed to 241), Luke had 342, and John 232.14
|English New Testament
||It was not until the thirteenth century
that those sections were changed, and then only gradually.
Stephen Langton, a
professor at the University of Paris and afterward Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Bible into the modern chapter divisions (c. 1227).
That was prior to the introduction of movable type in printing.
Wycliffe Bible (1382) followed that pattern, those basic divisions have
been the virtual base upon which the Bible has been printed to this very
|Latin New Testament
||The Vulgate New Testament was printed
by Gutenberg in 1456 and is known as the Mazarin Bible.
edition followed the thirteenth-century chapter divisions and paved the
way for such sectioning in the Rheims-Douay Version (1581-1609), which
became the authoritative English edition by decree of Pope Sixtus V in
The only major revision it experienced was by Bishop Challoner
|Greek New Testament
||This was first printed in 1516,
It was done in an effort to beat Cardinal Ximenes to the market, as the latter's work was already printed but bogged down in ecclesiastical
machinery in the matter of publication.
|Erasmus followed the chapter divisions of the Mazarin Bible (1456) and
therefore gave the same chapter divisions to the Protestant world that
Mazarin gave to the Catholics.
That provided a valuable common ground for
cross-references of biblical texts between Catholics and Protestants .
These were actually developed later than the chapters, apparently in an effort to further facilitate cross-references and make
public reading easier.
The markings first occur in the fourth edition of
the Greek New Testament published by Robert Stephanus, a Parisian printer,
in 1551. These verses were introduced into the English New Testament by
William Whittingham of Oxford in 1557.
In 1555, Stephanus introduced his
verse divisions into a Latin Vulgate edition, from which they have
continued to the present day.
The first Bible to use both the modern chapter and verse
divisions was the Latin Vulgate edition of Robert Stephanus (1555). He had
previously used those divisions in his Greek New Testament (1551).
The first English Bible to incorporate both the modern
chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible (1560).
It was actually
done in two parts:
||In 1557, the New Testament was done by Whittingham,
as a stopgap measure.
||In 1560, the entire Bible was
completed in the same tradition.
It employed modern chapter and verse divisions, and even
introduced italicized words into the text where English idiom
required fuller treatment than a simple Greek translation.
The Bible had attained its "modern" character
before the translation work of either the Rheims-Douay or the
so-called "authorized" versions of the Bible.