The modern reader has to read the Story of Scripture through the added distraction of chapters and verses.* The reduction of the metanarrative to chapters and verses added in the 1500s became the root for fragmentedly reading Scripture. Chapters and verses are clearly not a part of the metanarrative. The use of chapters and verses diverts the reader’s attention from the larger Story by the practice of being encouraged to memorize verses. From our earliest reading experiences we have learned to read in chapters. Verses, on the other hand, pose a whole different obstacle. Verses are a convenient way to look up a reference. But that’s where their usefulness ends. The addition of verses to the pages of the Bible is the single most harmful barrier to reading and understanding its Story. Most verses are only part of a sentence. To only read them or memorize them has no real meaning. These little groups of words that have been sloganized, placed on banners, greeting cards, and plaques are not God’s word when seen, memorized, or printed by themselves apart from their historical context. It is true to say that readers would not read one of their favorite books in this fragmented way.

*M. G. Easton, Easton’s Bible Dictionary “Chapter” (Public Domain, accessed June 24 2005).

The books of the Old and New Testaments were divided into chapters from an early time. The Pentateuch was divided by the ancient Hebrews into 54 parshioth (sections), one of which was read in the synagogue every Sabbath day (Acts 13:15). These sections were later divided into 669 sidrim (sections) of unequal length. The Prophets were divided in the same manner into haphtaroth or passages.

In the early Latin and Greek versions of the Bible, similar divisions were made. The New Testament books were also divided into portions of various lengths under different names with titles and heads or chapters.

In modern times this ancient example was imitated, and many attempts of the kind were made before the existing division into chapters was fixed. The Latin Bible published by Cardinal Hugo of St. Cher in A.D. 1250 is generally regarded as the first Bible that was divided into our present chapters, although it appears that some of the chapters were fixed as early as A.D. 1059. This division into chapters came gradually to be adopted in the published editions of the Hebrew Bible, with some few variations, and in the Greek Scriptures. The division into verses came in A.D. 1551 when Robert Stephens introduced a Greek New Testament with the inclusion of verses. The first entire English Bible to have verse divisions was the Geneva Bible A.D. 1560.

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