This page was migrated in August 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
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*Petuhot (singular petuha) are one sort of break in the Masoretic Text, somewhat akin to paragraph breaks in modern texts. The petuhot and setumot of the Masoretic Text are not features of the earliest texts. Nevertheless, they do have the virtue of telling us where certain unnamed pre-modern readers saw natural breaks in the flow of the text.
They are not quite like chapters. When chapters were added to the text in medieval Europe, there was a general effort to keep them of roughly similar sizes. The petuhot and setumot were not made with such an intention in mind.
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