Chapters and verses of the Bible

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) that were identified by two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. 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.[2] These two letters begin the Hebrew words open (patuach) and closed (sagur), and are, themselves, open in shape (פ) and closed (ס). The earliest known copies of the Book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls used parashot divisions, although they differ slightly from the Masoretic divisions.[3] (This is different from the use of consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet to structure certain poetic compositions, known as acrostics, such as several of the Psalms and most of the Book of Lamentations.)

The Hebrew Bible was also divided into some larger sections. In Israel the Torah (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) so it could be read through in one year.[3] The New Testament was divided into topical sections known as kephalaia by the fourth century. Eusebius of Caesarea divided the gospels into parts that he listed in tables or canons. Neither of these systems corresponds with modern chapter divisions.[4] (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.[5]

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.[6][7][8]

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),[9] Alexander Campbell's The Sacred Writings (1826),[10] 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),[11] Ernest Sutherland Bates's The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (1936),[12] The Books of the Bible (2007) from the International Bible Society (Biblica), Adam Lewis Greene's five-volume Bibliotheca (2014),[13][14] and the six-volume ESV Reader's Bible[15] (2016) from Crossway Books.

Since at least 916 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, 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. Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440.[7]

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.[16] His verse divisions in the New Testament were far longer than those known today.[17] The Parisian printer Robert Estienne created another numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament,[18] 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.[17]

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.

Most important are the verse endings. According to the Talmudic tradition, the division of the text into verses is of ancient origin.[19] 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 two horizontal dots following the word with a silluq.

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 start at the beginning of a new line, while "closed" sections never start at the beginning of a new line.

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 the Land of Israel.

• There are 929 chapters in the Old Testament.
  • 187 chapters in the Pentateuch
  • 249 chapters in the Historical books
  • 243 chapters in the Poetic books ("Wisdom")
  • 183 chapters in the Major prophets
  • 67 chapters in the Minor prophets
• There are 260 chapters in the New Testament.
  • 89 chapters in the Gospels
  • 28 chapters in Acts
  • 87 chapters in the Pauline Epistles (excluding Hebrews)
  • 34 chapters in the General Epistles (including Hebrews)
  • 22 chapters in Revelation
• This gives a total of 1,189 chapters (on average, 18 per book).
• Psalm 117, the shortest chapter, is also the middle chapter of the Bible, being the 595th Chapter.[24]
• Psalm 103:1-2 being the 15551st and 15552nd verses is in the middle of the 31102 verses of the Bible.
• Psalm 119 is the longest chapter of the Bible.
• Five books are a single chapter: Obadiah, Philemon, 2 & 3 John, Jude. In many printed editions, the chapter number is omitted for these books, and references just use the verse numbers.

• 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,[25] which is an average of a little more than 26 verses per chapter.
• 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, that is a translators' condensation of the Hebrew which literally translated is: "And Job answered and said."
• 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,[26] since Stephanus' rendering of Luke 20:30 includes some additional words.[27]
• Isaiah 10:8 ("Dicet enim") is the shortest verse in the Latin Vulgate.[28]
• 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.
• John 11:25 is the most read verse in funerals.[29]