Time With The Bible

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.