Bible Question: how is the bible divided |
Bible Answer: The first 5 books of the OT is known as the Pentatuch. The next 12 books are known as the History Section. Next is the 5 books of Poetry and Wisdom. Most of were written by Solomon. The next section of 5 books are known as the Major Prophets, not because of their superiority over the next section but most probably because of their size. The last section in the OT is the 12 books of the Minor Prophets. In the NT, the first 4 books are known as the Gospels as they tell the Good News of Jesus Christ, His Life, Ministry, Death, Burial and Ressurection. The next is the one single book of History for the NT. Next are all the 21 epistles (letters) written mostly by the Apostles; Paul wrote 13 of them himself. The last book is known as the book of Prophecy as it tell of many events in the future from the perspective of the 1st century. In the case of dividing up the Bible into chapters and verses, it's helpful to remember the writers of the Hebrew and Greek world didn't use caapitalization, punctuation or even a way of ending sentences as we do today. So it took someone who knew Koine Greek to understand the meaning and intent of the 1st century writers. The writers of the ancient world would take up many scrolls, mostly made of vellum, a document made of animal tissues. Sometimes it would take many, many scrolls, expecially on the long books like in the Pentatuch. Also they didn't divide their scrolls into chapters and verses we take so much for granted in today's modern world of quick and easy references. I discovered this section of Wikipedia which is most helpful about this latter innovation, which happened in different centuries. Chapters The original manuscripts did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers. Some portions of the original Hebrew texts were logically divided into parts following the Hebrew alphabet;[citation needed] for instance, the earliest known copies of the Book of Isaiah use Hebrew letters for paragraph divisions. (This was different from the acrostic structure of certain texts following the Hebrew alphabet, such as Psalm 119 and most of the Book of Lamentations.) There are other divisions from various sources which are different from what we use today. The Hebrew Bible began to be put into sections before the Babylonian Captivity (586 BC)[citation needed] with the five books of Moses being put into a 154-section reading program to be used in a three-year cycle. Later (before 536 BC[citation needed]) the Law was put into 54 sections and 669 sub-divisions for reading. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the New Testament had been divided into paragraphs, although the divisions were different from the modern Bible. Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro developed different schemas for systematic division of the Bible in the early 13th century. It is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based. Verses For at least a thousand years 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.[citation needed] One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a full stop or sentence break, resembling the colon (:) of English and Latin orthography. With the advent of the printing press and the translation of the Bible into English, Old Testament versifications were made that correspond predominantly with the existing Hebrew full stops, with a few isolated exceptions. A product of meticulous labour and unwearying attention, the Old Testament verse divisions stand today in essentially the same places as they have been passed down since antiquity. Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus's work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440.[2] The first person to divide New Testament chapters into verses was Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541), but his system was never widely adopted. Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament which was also used in his 1553 publication of the Bible in French. Estienne's system of division was widely adopted, and it is this system which is found in almost all modern bibles. The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524-1579). The first Bible in English to use both chapters and verses was the Geneva Bible published shortly afterwards in 1560. These verse divisions soon gained acceptance as a standard way to notate verses, and have since been used in nearly all English Bibles and the vast majority of those in other languages. End of article from Wikipedia. Hope this helps and Go with God in all things. Bill |