The Chapters in the Bible

When the Bible was first written, it wasn't divided up into chapters and verses. That happened later, in order to make it easier to refer to a particular passage. It wasn't convenient to refer to, say, the 3,427th sentence in Isaiah. Archbishop Stephen Langton undertook the original division into chapters in the 1200’s. Some of the books of the Bible were considered too small; it wasn't worth the trouble to divide them up into chapters, for example, the book of Jude. Jude has only 27 verses. The 23rd verse of Jude is usually referred to as Jude 1:23, just for the sake of consistency, but it is equally correct to refer to it as Jude :23. There are 66 books in the Bible. Do you know how many were divided up into chapters in the 1200’s? Actually, that's a trick question. There are 5 books (Obadiah, Philemon, 2nd John, 3rd John, and Jude) that were considered to be too small to divide into chapters, but the Book of Psalms has no chapters, either. The Book of Psalms is a collection of 150 different psalms (or songs), so that book already had clear divisions before the idea of chapters and verse came about, so, each Psalm was divided into verses, but there was no need to divide it into chapters (a lot of people refer to different psalms in the book as chapters—that is, the 23rd chapter of the Book of Psalms rather than the 23rd Psalm--of course, we all know what that means, so it shouldn't a big problem even if it is not technically correct). So, there are only 60 books that have chapters. Sometimes the division of chapters is a little frustrating. I don't understand some of the divisions. For example, in Genesis, most of the initial creation story is in Genesis Chapter 1, then, for some reason, Chapter 2 starts with God resting on the eighth day. Then, the narrative backtracks to day six, and gives us more details on the creation of man and woman. It seems to me that it would have made more sense to break the chapters in between the first, overall creation story, and then start chapter 2 with the detailed generational description. As it is, it seems to confuse some people, but, I suspect, mostly people who aren't really trying to understand. Robert Estienne did the division into verses in the 1500’s. Some of the verse divisions don’t seem to make a lot of sense, but, one of the guiding principles was that each verse should be consistent in whatever language it was read in (English, Ancient Greek, or Ancient Hebrew). That’s an important consideration, because the grammatical rules for the different languages vary, and cause words that would be together in one language to be separated in another (that is, in English we normally progress from subject to predicate to object, but most languages don't use the same grammatical structure that we do, which causes terms that we think should go together to become separated). Knowing what the criteria were makes it easier to deal with. I think it’s important to note that sometimes we make the mistake of looking at a single verse as being a single thought, and sometimes it is, but often it is not. Sometimes a verse must be read in context to get its full meaning. Many people know that the shortest verse in the Bible is John 8:38, “Jesus wept.” Not nearly so many people know why Jesus wept; you have to read the rest of the chapter to learn that, and some still don’t get it. Jesus wept because He was there to glorify God by raising Lazarus from the dead, and the people around Him didn’t have the faith to believe that. John even tells us that many of those present thought that Jesus wept because Lazarus was such a close friend, and that Lazarus was dead. That doesn’t make sense when you realize that all Jesus had to do to see Lazarus again was to call his name. The point is, the chapter and verse divisions are strictly a convenience item, so that, for example, if I want to tell you what I’m reading, I can tell you that I’m looking at the last six verses of Matthew Chapter 27. Now you know exactly what I’m talking about. It gets pretty cumbersome to try to describe a particular passage of Scripture without the chapter and verse numbers. Generally, the chapter and verse divisions should not be considered to be the beginning or ending of a logical thought, as you would expect in a book where the chapters are determined by the author.