This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer.
22 July 2022
The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, along with the other assorted Deuterocanonical works, are c in some (generally non-Protestant) Christian traditions, are currently divided into very short sections called verses.
In the case of the New Testament, the chapters came first, around the thirteenth century. The chapters were further subdivided into verses in the sixteenth century. Chapters and verses are for convenience only, and do not necessarily reflect any sort of actual structure in the Bible itself.
Sometimes they match well to the implicit structure of the Bible, sometimes less well.
In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the verses are older. Something like the modern divisions goes back all the way to at least 500 CE in Jewish sources, while the chapter divisions were made by a Christian in the thirteenth century, using a Bible in Latin not divided into chapters. These two systems were later merged into the hybrid that is now the chapter-and-verses system of the Hebrew Bible, used, with a few differences here and there, by both Jews and Christians.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.