1.4 Where Do Chapters and Verses Come From?

Welcome, everyone. I’m David K, your host for The Bible Unthumped. And, today on the podcast, we’re going to think a little bit about chapters and verses. Have you ever considered where they come from? There was a time, not so long ago, when I don’t think it had ever crossed my mind to really wonder why the Bible is organized in sentence-length fragments called verses and why sections of these verses made up chapters. Or to wonder whether it was always divided up this way. 

A few seconds’ worth of thought, which I hadn’t bothered to do, would have told me that it would be ridiculous to assume that the 66 books of the Bible, or however many, could possibly and coincidentally have been divided up by their respective authors into similarly-sized chunks. In other words, what are the chances that both the authors of Ezekiel and Luke and all of the other books just happened to apply the very same system of chapters and verses to organize their writing? 

So, of course, chapters and verses weren’t always part of the Bible. They are later inventions that got added in long after these books were written. So, where did they come from? Do we need them to be there? What are the pros and cons of reading a Bible divided into small segments and then into even smaller segments?

Let’s start by talking about when these scriptural subdivisions started to show up. 

In the very beginning of biblical writing, almost 3000 years ago, the technology of the book as we know it—two covers with pages between—hadn’t been invented. Long works were written on scrolls, instead. And, the physical length of a scroll, in large part, dictated how long a work could be. How much content would fit on something you could reasonably unroll and read? So, scroll-size limitations might be considered an early form of biblical subdivision. The major books of the Old Testament have roughly similar lengths for this reason, the longest having roughly 30,000 words when translated to English.  

But, there were other very early forms of subdividing the text. Ancient Hebrews sometimes used markings to denote the opening of a new paragraph, much like an indention symbol. We see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the early centuries AD.

There were also ancient ways for breaking down the scriptures into smallish sections for the purpose of reading through them in worship services during the course of a calendar year. This practice specifically applied to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. If you are familiar with high church liturgies, this will remind you of the lectionary in which particular sections of the Bible are read on specific calendar dates over the course of the year. 

And, of course, there is the book of Psalms, which, as a collections of songs and poems and reflections, kind of comes with ready-made divisions. Each psalm is distinct, and so, once compiled, they are logically then numbered as modern-day chapters. 

If you have ever seen a picture of an ancient Greek manuscript such as the Bible books would have been, or even have seen one in a museum, you might recall that what you saw were continuous rows of letters without so much as a period or comma or even any space between the letters themselves. From our present-day vantage point, it is remarkable how these texts just ran on and on without breaks to organize the thoughts or to allow the reader to come up for air. Where does a sentence start and stop? Where even does a word start and stop in these manuscripts? Those are problems for the translators of ancient texts to figure out. 

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The ancient systems that did exist for dividing the scripture don’t at all correspond to the chapters you know today. The chapters we use today date back to an Archbishop of Canterbury named Stephen Langton. For historical context, Archbishop Stephen was also instrumental in forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. If you recall from a couple of episodes ago, the “kind of” standardization of the Bible books happened in the late 4th Century, so it took a little over 800 years before Stephen first gave us our familiar chapters, and that happened, equally, about 800 years ago.

Verses are an even more recent invention. During the Middle Ages in the Jewish community, punctuation was inserted into scriptures to help the reader or, in some cases, the singer know when to take a breath or how to vocalize the text. It was really after the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, though, that breaking the text into fragments smaller than the chapter started to make organizational sense. 

Robert Etienne was a printer of classic texts in Paris in the 1500s who fled to Geneva after converting to Protestantism and getting himself in trouble with leading Catholic thinkers in France. Etienne printed the first Bibles that had the verse subdivisions that would be familiar to you today. So, your verses date back not quite 500 years. If you had asked a Christian as recently as the 1550s to turn in the Bible to a specific verse—say, the familiar John 3:16—they would have no way of knowing what to do or what you were talking about. They would be baffled. How can you reference a verse when there’s no such thing as verses, let alone a standard system for verses? 

In summary then, a Bible made up of chapters and verses is a fairly recent invention. While I did not myself grow up in a tradition that included “sword drills” for children, you can imagine how strange the practice would seem earlier in Christian history. If you are unfamiliar with “sword drills”, it is basically a competition in which evangelical kids are given a random book, chapter, and verse and then race to see who can find it first. It is a way of learning how to navigate the Bible as we have it. And yes, sword drills are a real thing. 

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Having a Bible fragmented into chapters and verses has upsides, and it also has downsides in terms of how it is understood and used.

Chapters and verses are just plain practical on some level. In the same way the script of a play is broken down into acts and scenes and lines, it helps you pinpoint yourself. Many ancient texts are subdivided just like the Bible books so that you can simply find what you are looking for. You often see something like the Iliad or Plato’s Republic printed with reference lines. This is especially helpful for scholars of the text, or preachers, who need ways to draw attention to specific words or lines. 

In fact, it’s a little hard today to imagine a text as large as the Bible without having some system to subdivide it into something you can make your way around. 

But, the very fact that these texts did not start out with breaks but now have them means that we have changed the way we encounter the Bible. Our reading experience of it does not look like the reading experience of the original ancient audience or match the intentions of the authors, and this creates problems. You are reading the Bible as a reference book, and it wasn’t written as a reference book.

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What follows here is a bit of a polemic and a bit of steering you away from non-scholarly use of the Bible. 

First, the Bible is made up of genres—none of which is “reference book”. The Bible books are a variety of stories, histories, poetry collections, biographies, didactic works, letters, and revelations. When you encounter this wide variety of literatures and see them all painted with a broad brush, a layer of subdivision numbers applied across them like a blanket, they lose their distinctions. The books look uniform, like one type of thing, when they are actually diverse. 

A verse from Proverbs isn’t the same thing as a line from one of Paul’s letters or from a story in Genesis. They are not the same genre of writing, but if you categorize them simplistically as “bible verses” they seem to carry the same weight and to be the same sort of thing and no longer convey any of the nuance you need to understand them. A poetic thought and a biographical note become just verses, apples and apples that are really apples, oranges, pears, and grapes.

Not only does a verse have literary context, but also cultural, linguistic, and historical context that gets easily lost by breaking it all up into bits.

Note, too, that the locations of chapter and verse divisions can, in fact, be quite arbitrary at times, with stories getting interrupted by chapter numbers, implying a break in the narrative or thought that really shouldn’t be there. Our friends Stephen Langton and Robert ETYEN weren’t always experts at choosing their placement.

Here’s the important point and the big stumbling block of chapters and verses: Having mini-fragments of text is an unfortunate invitation to extract these little chunks and treat them as though they are stand-alone thoughts, like individual puzzle pieces. But those pieces don’t mean much unless they are part of a complete, assembled puzzle. 

If I see something in fragment form, unfortunately, then I can use it in fragment form. We call this prooftexting—I can prove what I’m saying. See! Here’s a verse! This approach leads astray so many biblicists in Protestant traditions, taking tiny bits of scriptures literally without any critical thought. Verses fit too easily on couch pillows or bumper stickers.  

If you see a lone, floating verse—an individual puzzle piece—you should read it with caution. Your instinct as a scholarly reader should be to ask questions before you think you get what the passage is saying. Ask questions like Who wrote it? To whom? When was it written? Why was it written? What do the verses around it say? What are the themes of the book from which it's been extracted? How does this verse relate to those themes? What kind of literature was it taken from? And so forth. Whenever you hear the phrase, “the Bible says” followed by a mere sentence or two of ancient text, recognize that as a red flag and go looking for the context.

Here is a simple, perhaps a little silly, example of how prooftexting can easily go awry. Let’s read Matthew 23:9 in isolation: "Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” Now, if I were to remove that verse from its context, not just within the book of Matthew, but its historical and religious context, I am not sure what I would call my dad. In fact, I must not even have an earthly one of those dad people, as I just read. In reality, you can’t understand this verse without knowing about the ancient sect of the Pharisees and rabbinic religious teaching and the fathership and location of God as it was understood in the 1st Century. You shouldn’t assume you don’t have a dad just because the Bible tells you so. 

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This sort of verse extraction happens constantly to justify all sorts of dogma and to give quote unquote proof to almost anything a biblicist might want.

The Protestant version of the Bible contains over 31,000 verses as we have it today and about 2,000 chapters. If you want to find a snippet somewhere that says what you want it to say, you can back up almost anything you like by citing some chapter and verse and calling it Biblical. The Bible is a really big book, and whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s probably in there somewhere if you’ve sliced and diced it and remove it from its context. Like a whole bunch of data, if you pick and choose some numbers from here and some from there and form creative arrangements, you can make verses say almost anything you want, creating a Bible in your own image. 

This malleability explains in part why there are something like 9,000 different sects of Protestantism today that don’t fully agree with each other and all with some Bible verse or other to justify why they can’t get on the same page with the other 8,999 and their favorite verses.

So, to understand the contents and meaning of scripture in a way that is more respectful of the text, especially if you are a scholar, it’s helpful to pretend that it doesn’t have all of those little numbers hovering over the words every few sentences. Because of some of these problems we’ve mentioned, there are some Bibles being printed today, in fact—easy to find on Amazon—that leave out the chapters and verses so that you get a better sense of what it was like to read it before the 1500s. 

That will wrap it up for this episode. I have an intention with regard to this podcast. I want to present several episodes on a specific theme but then periodically, every seventh episode or so—kind of like a sabbath, maybe—take a break from presenting new information and instead answer some listener questions in an interview-style Q and A episode that relates to the content in the episodes leading up to it. 

We’ll see. But, I say that to say, I would welcome anyone listening to send in questions about anything you’ve heard. You can email the podcast if you have a question you’d like to submit. Make sure it specifically relates to some topic from the podcast so far, and we’ll sift through and see if we can incorporate your question into the interview episode coming up soon. Stay tuned for that. 

Thanks for listening again. Less thumping. More understanding. 

Please subscribe and share, and I’ll see you next time.