Chapters and Verses Are Reading the Bible For You

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan. And I'm Dan

Dan Beecher Beecher.

Dan McClellan This is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher It's a glorious day. Uh, it's a, it's a f- we're, we're out here having fun, and today we get to do a histories mysteries. Ooh. Uh, and that's gonna be fun. And it's so interesting. We're gonna be talking about why the Bible has chapters and verses, and where that comes from, 'cause apparently, weirdly enough, uh, the original authors didn't actually, uh, use those. So- Hmm ... we'll talk about that. Uh, let's just dive right into histories mysteries. Okay, so versification, uh, it didn't happen naturally. It didn't happen originally. Uh, so, so why do we all have chapters and verses and everything? When did that happen? Who did that happen? Why did that happen? How? All of the questions. Uh, w- what-

Dan McClellan And the answer is Jesus. The answer

Dan Beecher is-

Dan McClellan Thanks for watching, everybody ... magic. No, it, it's something that happened in, uh, you could say in fits and starts, kind of incrementally, because verses and chapters are, are obviously two different sizes of, of divisions. But there's, there's, there are attempts to try to divide up the text in some kind of way, going back pretty far. Okay. Um, so the, i- in the, in the early medieval period, I, I think we start to see, um, divisions into verses. Uh, kind of like paragraph-like units. You have, uh, the petucha is, is an open section in Hebrew, and then the setuma is a, a closed section. And so we already see Masoretic manuscripts from the medieval period that are beginning to divide up things into sense units like this. So if you-

Dan Beecher Well, and, and we should mention that, like, like, what the original manuscripts sort of looked like d- didn't even have punctuation.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah, no. The, um-

Dan Beecher So-

Dan McClellan No, I'm, I'm starting with the Hebrew Bible, but, but, um, to, to consider both of them briefly, yeah, they were, uh, uh, written in scripta continua, which, which would be like there are no spaces between words. Uh, i- it's just all written as a, as a mass and, and, you know, frequently a word starts on one line and, and finishes on, on the next line down. Ugh. You can look at the, the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can see an example of this. There are no vowels, uh, as we're used to seeing them in printed Hebrew, and, uh, things were written kind of together. And this is particularly true of, uh, the Greek New Testament manuscripts as well, where it's all just smooshed together, and they didn't even have accents or breathing marks- Right ... for the first, like, nine centuries of- Ugh ... the New Testament. And so when we-

Dan Beecher It's so painful to imagine. It's, I, like, when I, when I imagine text like that, I just, I, I, I can't imagine how long it takes a sch- I guess maybe you get used to it. But it, uh, but, like, just making sense of that, and also, obviously, so many opportunities for it to go wrong. For, for the sense that you're making to be incorrect or whatever. And that's before we even have punctuation, which helps it make sense, and before we have spaces and stuff. So all right, sorry, sorry. I- ... my mind gets a little bit blown, and then I, I, I have to, like, have a bit of a, I, I go into a reverie. So let's g- So continue with what you were saying.

Dan McClellan Yeah, so, uh, when, when we're talking about the Hebrew Bible, we have these divisions into what would ultimately kind of become the verses of the Hebrew Bible. So versification in the Hebrew Bible predates versification in the New Testament. And-

Dan Beecher And it was the Masoretes that did this?

Dan McClellan Uh, we, we find it in Masoretic manuscripts. There are some indications, when you look in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are some places where there are gaps, uh, that, that roughly correspond to some of the later divisions.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Uh, you also had, uh, liturgical divisions within the Hebrew Bible, where there was a, the Palestinian triennial cycle, where they divided up, uh, the Torah into 154 sedarim, uh, which y- meant the Torah could be read over the course of about three years. And then you have the Babylonian annual cycle, where the Torah is divided into 54 parashot. And, um, these divisions were kinda maintained. These are larger scale divisions, not verse divisions.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Uh, and by the time we get to, uh, the, like, the, the Leningrad Codex, which dates to around 1008 CE, we've got a f- pretty stable verse, uh, system.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Where there are, there's a type of punctuation that is indicated in the text. Uh, and even before that punctuation that would mark the end of a verse, they used cantillation marks and certain kinds of accents to divide up things. And, and in the Hebrew Bible today, you will see that there are further divisions. Like, the verse itself can be divided further. Uh, they usually have a little, uh, a mark that's like a chevron or a caret that marks the accent for the main division of a verse into two different divisions. Okay. Uh, that's called the atnah. And then you have, you have other further divisions. So, so the, the Masoretes did all kinds of dividing up, uh, and counting. And, um, vocalization and, and all this kind of stuff. It's, it's an amazing system that they developed. Uh, and then this, in, um, in, for the Hebrew Bible, you had Christians who were also working with the text. And so in the 1200s, you have, uh, Stephen Langton, who divides up the Hebrew Bible into, uh, divisions using the, uh, into chapter divisions-

Dan Beecher Okay

Dan McClellan ... using the, uh, the Vulgate. Uh, so the Latin Bible is, is what he uses for this. And then, so now you have Jewish verse divisions and parashot and things like that. You have Christian chapter divisions in the Vulgate, and because Jewish and Christian scholars and people were communicating, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes not, there was some, uh, these chapter divisions bled into what was going on within Judaism, and so Judaism kinds of adopts some of these chapter divisions, uh, because this became necessary as they were like, "Well, what, what passage are you talking about?" You know.

Dan Beecher And are the divisions... I, I, I assume that they're meant to be sense units in some way. Like, this, like, like, they're, they're meant to be divided up in a way that the, this part all seems to be of a piece, so I'll just put that together.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher It's not, it's not like, you know, every 200 words, we just make a line and, and go. Like, I assume that-

Dan McClellan I, I-

Dan Beecher ... they're trying-

Dan McClellan I think it was a bit of a, a bit of both because I think you have some sense units that were, uh, initially large enough that they would've felt a little awkward as, you know, one chapter. And so you do... I think there are some places where you have chapter divisions where you probably could have left, let it keep going. Um-

Dan Beecher Okay

Dan McClellan ... but at the, but at the same time, yeah, as, as they're trying to divide up the, the chapters, they are looking for scenes at which to place the chapters. So that was the work of that 13th century, uh, Christian who w- was doing that. And when we, when you compare the Christian Bible to the Jewish Bible, the, there's, uh, it is consistent most of the time, but there are a handful of places where the chapter divisions are different.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so there, uh, and it can be just one verse off, and particularly in the Psalms. And then there are other places where it's, like, 10 verses off. So I, I would say 92% of the time they're identical.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan But then that other eight-ish percent, and I am just off the dome here-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... that eight-ish percent, give or take-

Dan Beecher Don't hold him to it, everybody

Dan McClellan ... eight percent. Yeah. Um, they're off by, you know, one to a dozen, maybe 15 or 20 verses for the-

Dan Beecher Wow

Dan McClellan ... the, the largest discrepancies are maybe that large. I haven't counted them up, so I don't know. But I, um, but, but there are some larger discrepancies.

Dan Beecher So to be clear, what we're saying is that, like, the words are all the same, but, like, where the, where the numbers go is different.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, and you didn't have- ... uh, verse numbers added, uh, until the 15th century.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And that's, and that's-

Dan Beecher Oh, that's interesting. So-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... so before numbers-

Dan McClellan So you just had divisions, but y- but you didn't have numbers.

Dan Beecher What did those divisions look like if they weren't numbered?

Dan McClellan Well, the, like in the Hebrew Bible-

Dan Beecher Just-

Dan McClellan ... you would have a special kind of, like, oversized colon that would indicate-

Dan Beecher Oh

Dan McClellan ... the end of the verse, or you would have, uh, a letter P to indicate a, a, a specific division-

Dan Beecher Okay

Dan McClellan ... um, of the verses.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, but they wouldn't be numbered. So yeah, the, but the numbers were added around the 15th century, and that facilitated, you know, more precise referencing. Uh, and then, you know, as Jewish folks and Christian folks were debating with each other, it was, it was easier to figure out exactly where your opponent was- ... in the text. And then also, this facilitated the public reading of the text-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... 'cause you could get up and say, "I'm in this chapter. We're gonna be talking about this verse," and, uh, you know, and then you could proceed to bore people to tears.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Um, but yeah. So it's, it's, like I said, fits and starts. It's incrementally, you're getting smaller divisions, then you're getting larger divisions, and then you're numbering the divisions. Uh, and, and that's how the Hebrew Bible got to be, uh, where it is more or less today. And, and-

Dan Beecher And all of this happened before the printing press, is that right? Like-

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Wow, that's impressive.

Dan McClellan Yeah, this was, this was stuff that was being done by hand. Oh, man. The, the, the Masoretes are on another level-

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah

Dan McClellan ... uh, when it comes to, uh, their, their transcriptions and their accounting and their knowledge of, of the text and everything like that. Um, then we, when we get to the New Testament, you have, again, the, when you look at papyri and manuscripts of the New Testament, you have scripta continua. Some of them are majuscule, where it's all uppercase letters. Some of them are minuscule, where it's all lowercase letters .

Dan Beecher Oh, no.

Dan McClellan Where we, we don't have the accents and the breathing marks and things like that. Um, but you have, around the third century, uh, the gospels being divided into numbered sections, and this was primarily to facilitate comparison in, in kind of, like, harmonizing. "Where is this story in this other, um, gospel?" So you're dividing it up into sections. Uh, and so gospel comparison and harmonization is kind of the, the foundation of these, uh, unit divisions for the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And then in the, the Byzantine period, so, uh, you know, fourth, fifth century and on, you get chapter-like divisions- kephalaia or kephalaia, uh, which means headings, is one kind of division that kind of roughly corresponds to chapter. Um, and then you have titloi or titloi, uh, which would be the, the titles that would be added. And they differed from manuscript to manuscript, but some of them overlap more or less with, with later chapter divisions. Um, but the system that Langton used to divide up the Hebrew Bible into chapters then is used to divide up the New Testament into chapters in those Latin Bibles. And then from the Latin Bibles, that makes its way back into Greek manuscripts. And then the printed-- By the time you get to the printed Greek New Testament, and this starts with Desiderius Erasmus in the early 16th century. He, um-- And th- this is kind of funny. The Desiderius Erasmus was really producing editions of the Latin Vulgate, and he heard that another guy out there was gonna try to create a printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and his publisher was like, "You could beat him. You could- ... you get it out first." And he was like, "Okay." And so he generated a dual column, Latin on one side, Greek on the other, uh, using the, the seven Greek New Testament manuscripts that were available to him at his library in Switzerland, and he managed to get it out the door before the other guy. Uh, and so his work became-

Dan Beecher So now he's famous-

Dan McClellan ... the standard

Dan Beecher ... and the other guy is just-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... uh, nobody.

Dan McClellan And, uh, so he created the first printed Greek New Testament. Even though the last chapter of Revelation, he didn't have a witness to it in the Greek New Testament manuscripts he had, so he took the Latin and translated it back into Greek-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... and slapped it under that other, um, that other column. But, uh, he created multiple editions of what he called his, uh, Novum Instrumentum, uh, which would then later become called the, uh, Textus Receptus. And then other editors took up his work and continued that on, and then there was a guy named Stephanus or Robert Estienne, um, and I'm sure, uh, the, the French speakers out there- ... uh, did not appreciate that. But, um, in 1551, I think it was either his second or his third edition. He had begun editing editions of the Textus Receptus, but in 1551, he published his edition of the Greek New Testament, where he divided up the Greek New Testament into verses.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So versification for the Greek New Testament, uh, doesn't happen until 1551, and then that was the-- that became the source text, at least the, the versification source text, for the very first printed Bible that had numbered verses, uh, in the New Testament, and that was the Geneva Bible-

Dan Beecher Okay

Dan McClellan ... first published in 1560.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So when you have Tyndale, you have Coverdale, you have the Matthew Bible, you have the Great Bible, these are all without versification in the New Testament, and then the Geneva is the first to versify everything.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, and after the Geneva, you get the Bishop's Bible, first published in 1568, and then the King James Version comes along in 1611, and it is a, a, a very conservative revision of the, uh, 1502 edition of the Bishop's Bible. So they're all, uh, they're all keeping it in the family.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But, uh, but yeah, the, the verse- versification that we have now is, uh, is based on that 1551 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus.

Dan Beecher I think it's so interesting because, uh, when, when we look at these, uh, these scriptures, the- we were all raised with fully versified scripture, scriptures-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ... and that's how we think of it. And so when someone quotes a scripture, and they just say it's verse 12, and they just say verse 12, it can be very easy to think, "Okay, that's what the author meant for us to ta- You know, there-

Dan McClellan Yeah, yeah

Dan Beecher ... it makes sense that the author had this takeaway, and it was verse 12." And it's not. A- and, you know, if you expand it into-- If you look at it without the verses, just lifting something like verse 12 out is alm- is, is almost weird to do because, because it's, it's, it's part of a whole paragraph or a whole, a, a whole sense unit that's-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... the... So it, it... So, like, it's, it's so normal in our eyes, in our, in our lives to say, "Look at this verse. Look at that verse," uh, you know. But, I mean, we've talked about moments where that doesn't make any sense. Where somebody just made a choice-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ... they cut off Genesis 1 in one place, and then there's four extra verses in Genesis 2 that very clearly belong to Genesis 1, and it doesn't make sense to have them. Then w- so we have to cut them off of the f- the top of Genesis 2, for Genesis 2-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... to make sense as its own thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and, and another famous example of this is Ephesians 5-

Dan Beecher Okay

Dan McClellan ... where we, we have in verse 21, "Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ." And then in, in most editions of the Bible, like the NET or the ESV, or even the NRSVue, there's a section division separating verse 21 from verse 22.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But verse 22 is part of the same sentence-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... as verse 21. In fact, the verb is in verse 21. Verse 22 doesn't have a verb. It is governed by the verb in verse 21.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But you have-- You will have an entire section division- separating a single sentence. But-

Dan Beecher Oh, wow, a section division.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Not just a verse divi- wow.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there's, there are a lot of people who have noticed this, that, that, you know, to divide it up into verses. And the, the formatting is, is a big part of this. If you look in the King James Version, a standard King James Version, it's just every verse is its own paragraph marked off by, by a number. And, um, you know, and, and Latter-day Saints are, are probably the most blind to this because the LDS Church has, has always published a kind of traditional King James Version.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And they, they have pilcrows in the K- King James Version, which is that kind of backwards P looking thing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that's supposed to indicate this is a paragraph division.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But we just gloss right over it without thinking of it as, take a breath, we're starting a new sense unit.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Uh, and, and so that affects meaning. And so there's a, there's a really cool project. A guy named Adam Green, um, published a, a, an edition of the Bible called Bibliotheca. And it gets rid of chapter numbers. It gets rid of verse numbers. It gets rid of section headings. It gets rid of study tools. Gets rid of cross-references. It's just the text. And it is, uh, it does introduce paragraphs in order to try to get some kind of sense units in there. But the idea is, let's not have versification or chapter divisions govern how you're going to consume the text.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan 'Cause people will be like, "I'm gonna read so many verses. I'm gonna read a chapter."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And, and the idea here is, no, read until the sense unit concludes. And it's a different experience-

Dan Beecher Right

Dan McClellan ... of the text. And even in the King James Version, there's extra punctuation. The commas, the semicolons, all that kind of stuff, is actually to facilitate something very specific. Because when you have more punctuation, you have more pauses, and this is intended to facilitate the slower reading of the text in public-

Dan Beecher Mm

Dan McClellan ... so that your audience has time to, um, digest every clause, every, um, every single division of the text. So they, they really want you divide it down to the, the clause level, so that as you're reading it, you pause, and that gives them a little more time to think about what you just said. You move on to the next clause, and there's a, you know, may- maybe there's a, a semicolon.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Pause. That gives them a little more time. So the, when it, it comes to the King James Version at least, the punctuation, the formatting, the versification, everything is designed for a church setting, for the text to be read out loud in a church setting to an audience that is listening.

Dan Beecher Well, that, that's actually really interesting too. As someone who's studied, um, Shakespeare, but from the perspective as, uh, of an actor-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ... so I, I, I've done quite a lot of Shakespearean performances, and I, you know, I studied how to perform Shakespeare. And one of the things that you have to sort of contend with is that, you know, you know, Sha- actors pay a lot of attention to, uh, to punctuation because it's, you know, it's a guidepost, like you say, for how, h- you know, where you're gonna pause, where you're, how it's going to s- to hit people's ears, et cetera. But also, we, we know that the punctuation that, you know, that's in one, you know, the, the Penguin version of Romeo and Juliet is gonna be different-

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm

Dan Beecher ... from the one that's in the Riverside Complete Works and whatever because-

Dan McClellan Yeah

Dan Beecher ... different editors have gone through. You know, because the first folio was different, and the way that they punctuated back in the 1500s and f- w- is very different and, from the way that we would punctuate something now, from the way that we would make sense of, uh, how punctuation is used.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So, so yeah, looking at the punctuation of a, uh, of something from the, the King James is going to be different than looking at th- than how we would punctuate something now. And that, yeah, that's, uh... It's just fascinating to me that we have- ... so many of these, these layers of things, you know, that have been implemented to make more sense or to help us through this slog. It's a lot. There's a lot of text-

Dan McClellan Yeah, and it-

Dan Beecher ... in the Bible. And it's not easy. But it, but also, like, even though it was meant to make sense, and a lot of people put in a lot of work to help it, there are so many layers, starting with starting with where we divide the words.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then inserting vowels. And then, yeah, like, sentence breaks and paragraphs and quotation marks and, like, you know, commas and periods and all of that stuff. These were decisions that were made hundreds and then thousands of years after the original writing took place.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And, uh, uh, so yeah, there's something fascinating to me about how, uh, how all of these choices affect how we're reading it and, and modify it from how we would've read it from an ancient, in, in an ancient time.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, and if you ignore this, this i- these are, these are interpretive lenses.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Like, these affect meaning, and they're standing between you and the text, and there's a whole pile of them. And when you ignore them and just imagine that you're getting the unadulterated original text, you're just letting those decisions determine what the text is able to mean for you.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I think a lot more people need to be aware of the fact that even, even the way the text is punctuated is making decisions for you-

Dan Beecher Yeah

Dan McClellan ... about what the text is going to mean. And, uh, and I think the, the more people are aware of that, the more informed they can be about, uh, how they're engaging with the text if they are someone who is going to engage with the text as something authoritative or at least meaningful and useful.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Fascinating. So, such cool stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go. Uh, if, if you think that you know somebody that might be interested in this, that might wanna hear this, please feel free to send it to them. Please point them our way. We always appreciate that. If you would like to become a part of making this h- all happen, we'd love for you to go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can sign up to be one of our patrons. Give us a little chunk of your change, and in exchange, you'll get, uh, you can get access to early and ad-free episodes as well as y- uh, the after party, which is bonus content that we do for you every single week. Um, so please look into that if that's something that you are able to do. Uh, that, we're always so grateful. And speaking of gratitude, we're grateful to Roger for editing the show, and thanks so much to Sam for being our right-hand guy. And thanks to all y'all for tuning in. We will talk to you again next time.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.