Chapters and verses of the Bible

Since the early 13th century, most copies and editions of the Bible have presented all but the shortest of the scriptural books with divisions into chapters, generally a page or so in length.

[2][3] Early manuscripts of the biblical texts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers.

In Israel, the Torah (its first five books) were divided into 154 sections so that they could be read through aloud in weekly worship over the course of three years.

Chapter divisions, with titles, are also found in the 9th-century Tours manuscript Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Lat.

Since at least 916 the Tanakh has contained an extensive system of multiple levels of section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions that were indicated in Masoretic vocalization and cantillation markings.

One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a period or sentence break, resembling the colon (:) of English and Latin orthography.

[9] The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was the Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santes Pagnino (1470–1541), but his system was never widely adopted.

[19] The Parisian printer Robert Estienne created another numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament,[20] which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French.

The Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible notes several different kinds of subdivisions within the biblical books: Most important are the verses, or passukim (MH spelling; now pronounced pesukim by all speakers).

[22] In Masoretic versions of the Bible, the end of a verse, or sof passuk, is indicated by a small mark in its final word called a silluq (which means "stop").

[citation needed] For the Torah, this division reflects the triennial cycle of reading that was practiced by the Jews of the Land of Israel.

[citation needed] Christians also introduced a concept roughly similar to chapter divisions, called kephalaia (singular kephalaion, literally meaning heading).