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Did you know that chapters and verses were not an original part
of the Bible? I wonder how long it took someone to find a
particular sentence in the Bible before these aids were
introduced? Did you know that these great aids to Bible study
can also be a hindrance?
Some of the Old Testament books had divisions according to the
Hebrew alphabet (Psalm 119 for
example). Other than those exceptions, the books themselves were
the smallest of divisions. Prior to the modern divisions there
were efforts to divide the books of Moses into paragraphs and
other efforts to divide the Old Testament into unnumbered
verses. It was in 1227 AD that Stephen Langton divided the
books into chapters. The first Bible to make use of the chapter
divisions was the Wycliffe Bible of 1382.
It was in 1448 AD that Nathan, a Jewish rabbi, divided the Old
Testament into verses. In 1555 AD Robert Estienne (Robert
Stephens) divided and printed a Bible that utilized the standard
verses we have today. The Geneva Bible (1560 AD) was the first
English Bible to use chapters and verses.
As noted in the beginning of this article, finding a passage
without these divisions would have been quite difficult.
Without question the addition of chapters and verses have proven
to be of great help in Bible study.
But there is also a great drawback of which one needs to be
mindful. Much can be lost in understanding the meaning of a
text if one allows the arbitrary divisions to dictate the flow
of thought rather than the actual text. Many a reader has
missed an inspired conclusion to a thought because the
conclusion was actually in the first verse of the next chapter.
Too often people fail to see the connection between verses
because they treat individual verses as unconnected thoughts.
To interpret a verse as though it was an isolated thought,
rather than part of a context can lead to erroneous
conclusions.
After utilizing the chapter and verse to find the particular
place of study, the good Bible student then will ignore the
divisions and allow the flow of the inspired text to guide the
mind.
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