Answer # 37

The system of dividing the Bible into chapters and verses is man-made and of comparatively recent origin. The Bible, as inspired by God, had no such divisions.

Perhaps the first attempted division of the Bible was undertaken by the Jews. After the Babylonian captivity, they marked off the scrolls into subdivisions. This system was quite different from the one that is in use today, however.

The first modern system of dividing the Bible into sections was devised by Cardinal Hugo in the mid-13th century. Hugo, who was compiling a concordance to the Latin Vulgate Version of the Bible, found it necessary to divide the Bible into sections. These sections basically became the chapters that we are acquainted with today. As yet there were no divisions into verses.

Later, in 1445, Mordecai Nathan, a Jew, divided the Hebrew Old Testament into chapters. He and a later scholar by the name of Athias further broke the Old Testament chapters into verses.

In 1551 the New Testament was similarly subdivided into verses, by English printer Robert Stephens. Ever since that time, the Bible has retained the present chapter and verse system.

The system is not perfect. In some places, Stephens' divisions are inaccurate and tend to break the sense of the subject. Because of such imperfections, a new system of supplementing the chapter-verse division with paragraph arrangements has been adopted in many of the newer revisions of the Bible. This often helps the reader to better comprehend the subject matter.