Versification (Bible)

The Bible is a compilation of many shorter books written at different times by a variety of authors, and later assembled into the biblical canon. All but the shortest of these books have been divided into chapters, generally a page or so in length, since the early 13th century. Since the mid-16th century, each chapter has been further divided into "verses" of a few short lines or sentences. Sometimes a sentence spans more than one verse, as in the case of Ephesians 2:8–9, and sometimes there is more than one sentence in a single verse, as in the case of Genesis 1:2. As the chapter and verse divisions were not part of the original texts, they form part of the paratext of the Bible.

The Jewish divisions of the Hebrew text differ at various points from those used by Christians. For instance, in Jewish tradition, the ascriptions to many Psalms are regarded as independent verses or parts of the subsequent verses, making 116 more verses, whereas the established Christian practice is to treat each Psalm ascription as independent and unnumbered. Some chapter divisions also occur in different places, e.g. 1 Chronicles 5:27–41 in Hebrew Bibles is numbered as 1 Chronicles 6:1–15 in Christian translations.

The original manuscripts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers. In antiquity Hebrew texts were divided into paragraphs (parashot) that were identified by two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Peh פ indicated an "open" paragraph that began on a new line, while Samekh ס indicated a "closed" paragraph that began on the same line after a small space. These two letters begin the Hebrew words open (patuach) and closed (sagoor), and are, themselves, open פ and closed ס. The earliest known copies of the Book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls used parashot divisions, although they differ slightly from the Masoretic divisions. (This is different from the use of consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet to structure certain poetic compositions, known as acrostics, such as several of the Psalms and most of the Book of Lamentations.)

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