Where Chapter and Verse Numbers Came From

Written Without Numbers

Every reader of the Bible knows what "John 3:16" means: the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verse 16. Yet none of the books of the Bible was written with chapters or verses. Moses, David, Isaiah, Luke and Paul wrote continuous text, and the copies that the synagogues and the early churches read from were continuous too. The chapter numbers came into the Latin Bible in Paris early in the thirteenth century, and the verse numbers most of us use were first printed for the Old Testament in 1528 and for the New Testament in 1551. They are a help added by later hands so that readers could find a place and point others to it. They were never meant to change a word of what God had given, and they did not.

The Scriptures themselves show how a passage was found before there were numbers. When the Lord Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, he was handed the scroll of Isaiah. Luke says that he opened¹ it, which in Greek means that he unrolled it, and then found the place² he wanted to read.

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,

Luke 4:17
KJV

The Ethiopian whom Philip met on the road to Gaza was reading the same prophet in his chariot. Luke calls what he was reading "the place of the scripture", using a Greek word for a passage marked off from what surrounds it. It is the only time the word³ appears in the New Testament, and the passage it names is the one we now call Isaiah 53:7–8.

The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth:

Acts 8:32
KJV

Quoting Scripture by Its Place

When the Lord and the apostles quoted Scripture, they named a passage by what happened in it or by the writer who gave it. Answering the Sadducees about the resurrection, Jesus pointed them to the account of Moses at the burning bush. Anyone who knew the books of Moses knew where to look. We would write Exodus 3:6.

And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?

Mark 12:26
KJV

The letter to the Hebrews twice introduces a quotation by saying only that it was spoken "in a certain place". The phrase is built on a small Greek word⁴ meaning "somewhere", and the writer uses it with Psalm 8 in Hebrews 2:6 and with Genesis 2 here. The writer could rely on his readers knowing the Scriptures well enough to supply the rest.

For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.

Hebrews 4:4
KJV

So the habit of quoting by place is as old as Scripture. What the later centuries added was a shared set of numbers, so that a reader in one country could send a reader in another to the same sentence without knowing the passage already.

The Older Divisions

Long before the modern numbers, the people who copied and read Scripture marked it into sections. Hebrew scribes divided the text into paragraphs. Where a new section began, they either left the rest of the line empty and began on a fresh line, which is called an open section, or left a smaller gap within the line, which is called a closed section. The same practice can already be seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The books of Moses were also divided into portions for public reading on the Sabbath: in Babylonia the Law was read through in a year, in fifty-four portions, while in the land of Israel the reading took about three years. For the way the Hebrew books were themselves arranged, see The Arrangement of the Hebrew Canon.

The Hebrew text was also read verse by verse. The Jewish teachers of the early centuries already spoke of verses as fixed units, and the Masoretes, the scribes who guarded and copied the Hebrew text from about the sixth century to the tenth, placed a mark at the end of every verse. These were the same verses that readers know today, but they carried no numbers. For how carefully those scribes worked, see The Process of Writing and Copying Ancient Manuscripts.

Greek copies of the Gospels had divisions of their own. Early in the fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea divided the four Gospels into numbered sections and drew up ten tables, called canons, that showed which sections of one Gospel told the same event as sections of another. Greek manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries also divided the Gospels into longer chapters, each with a short title, which the Greeks called kephalaia. Neither system matches the chapters we use, and both were made to help readers compare and find, which is the purpose the later numbers served as well.

Stephen Langton's Chapters

In the churches of the West, the Bible was read in Latin, in the translation made by Jerome. Several schemes of chapters were used in Latin manuscripts, and they did not agree with one another. The one that prevailed is credited to Stephen Langton, an Englishman who taught theology in Paris for many years and became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1207. His chapters are usually dated to about 1204 or 1205, while he was still teaching in Paris. Some date the work later in his life, and the exact year is not recorded.

The evidence that the chapters are his comes from writers after his time. Chronicles record under the year of his death, 1228, that Master Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, numbered the Bible at Paris, and an early list of the chapter divisions in a Paris manuscript is headed with the archbishop's name. His own commentaries follow nearly the same divisions. The Bibles copied in Paris through the thirteenth century carried his chapters across Europe, and the first printed Latin Bibles kept them. With few changes, they are the chapters in every Bible today.

Numbering the Verses

The next step came from a Jewish scholar. In the 1440s, at Arles in the south of France, Rabbi Isaac Nathan compiled the first concordance of the Hebrew Bible, an index of where each Hebrew word occurs. To give a reference for every word, he used the Christian chapters and numbered the Hebrew verses within them. His was the first Hebrew work to divide the text into Langton's chapters and to number the verses inside each one. His concordance was printed at Venice in 1523. By then the Christian chapters were already marked in printed Hebrew Bibles, beginning with those Daniel Bomberg printed at Venice in 1517 and 1518.

The first printed Bible to number its verses throughout was a Latin one. Santes Pagnino, an Italian Dominican, published at Lyon in 1528 a new Latin translation from the Hebrew and Greek, with the Old Testament verses numbered as the Hebrew text divides them. His New Testament verses were much longer than ours, and they did not last.

The New Testament verses we use came from Robert Estienne, a Paris printer who also used the Latin form of his name, Stephanus. He had been the king's printer in Paris, but the theologians of the Sorbonne objected to the notes in his Bibles, and about 1550 he moved to Geneva and joined the Reformed church there. In 1551 at Geneva he printed a Greek New Testament with two Latin translations beside it, and beside the text he numbered every verse. These are the New Testament verses still in use, with only small changes since.

His son Henri later wrote that his father divided the verses while travelling on horseback from Paris to Lyon. Some have taken this to mean that he worked in the saddle, and have blamed the jolting of the horse for verse breaks they disliked. Others read Henri's words to mean that his father did the work at the inns where he stopped along the road. Either way, the work was done quickly, and it was done for the same practical reason as Isaac Nathan's: Estienne was preparing a concordance of his own, and a concordance needs a number for every verse.

Estienne used the numbers again in a French Bible of 1553 and in a Latin Bible of 1555, which joined Pagnino's Old Testament verses to his own New Testament verses throughout. From then on, a Bible could be cited to the verse in any language. Hebrew Bibles followed in time, and by 1661 a Hebrew Bible printed in Amsterdam by Joseph Athias carried a number at every verse.

Chapters and Verses Come into English

The English Bible made by the followers of John Wycliffe in the 1380s was translated from the Latin, so it followed Langton's chapters. William Tyndale's New Testament of 1526 was also divided into chapters, but it had no verse numbers, since none had yet been printed. For the man whose words fill so much of the King James Version, see William Tyndale: The Man Behind the King James Version.

The English exiles in Geneva were the first to bring the verse numbers into English. In 1557 William Whittingham published there an English New Testament with Estienne's verses, and in 1560 the complete Geneva Bible gave English readers the whole of Scripture with numbered verses for the first time, each verse beginning a new line. It quickly became the household Bible of England and Scotland. When the King James Version appeared in 1611, it kept the same chapters and verses and set each verse apart in the same way.

Where the Numbers Differ

Bibles in use today do not all number every chapter alike, and the clearest case is the Psalms. Many psalms open with a title, such as the title of Psalm 51, which tells when David wrote it. The King James Version gives that title no verse number of its own: it stands at the head of the psalm, just before the words "Have mercy upon me, O God", and both are counted as verse 1, as in the verse below. Hebrew Bibles count the title as part of the psalm, and in Psalm 51 the title fills two verses, so the same words "Have mercy upon me, O God" stand at Psalm 51:3. Translations made on the Hebrew count, among them the Czech Kralice Bible, the Dutch Statenvertaling and the Hungarian Károli Bible, number the verse the same way.

To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

Psalms 51:1
KJV

Bibles that follow the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate also number the psalms themselves differently, because they join Psalms 9 and 10 into one. For most of the Psalter their numbers run one behind, and Psalm 51 is their Psalm 50. The Douay-Rheims Bible and the Ukrainian Bible both give these words as Psalm 50:3. For the psalm itself, see A Verse-by-Verse Study of Psalm 51.

A few chapter breaks differ too. The promise of the Spirit poured out on all flesh, which Peter quoted at Pentecost (Acts 2:17), is Joel 2:28 in English Bibles and Joel 3:1 in Hebrew Bibles and in the Ukrainian translation. The last six verses of the Old Testament, which English Bibles print as Malachi 4, are verses 19 to 24 of Malachi 3 in Hebrew Bibles. In every case the words are the same, and only the labels differ. Because of this, the verse pages here match a verse across editions by its words, so that the page for Psalm 51:1 shows the Ukrainian text that its own Bible numbers Psalm 50:3.

Where a Chapter Break Cuts a Sentence

The numbers have been a great gift. They make concordances, cross-references and Bible memory possible, and they let a congregation turn to the same page together. But a chapter or verse break is only a reference mark, and in some places it falls in the middle of a thought. A reader who stops at the end of a chapter can miss the sentence that finishes it.

At the end of Matthew 16 Jesus says that some standing with him would see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. The next chapter opens six days later with three of those disciples on the mountain where he was transfigured.

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Matthew 16:28
KJV

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart,

Matthew 17:1
KJV

Faithful readers have understood the saying in more than one way. Matthew Henry took it to point chiefly to the coming of Christ's kingdom in the gospel church, yet he also wrote that "some little specimen was given of his glory a few days after this, in his transfiguration", and added of that event, "then he tried his robes." Mark and Luke both place the transfiguration straight after the same saying, which suggests that the chapter break here divides what the Gospel writers kept together. For the event itself, see The Transfiguration of Jesus.

The first verse of Ephesians 5 turns on the word "therefore", which looks back to the verse before it. Paul's call to be followers of God rests on God's forgiveness in Christ, which the last verse of chapter 4 describes.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

Ephesians 4:32
KJV

Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.

Ephesians 5:1-2
KJV

Matthew Henry's commentary, whose notes on Ephesians were finished after his death by another minister, makes the same point about the opening of chapter 5: "The apostle had been insisting on this in the former chapter, and particularly in the last verses of it, to which the particle therefore refers." Read as one passage, the two chapters say that the forgiven forgive, because they are learning to be like their Father.

The same thing happens between 1 Corinthians 13 and 14. Paul ends the chapter on love with charity as the greatest of the three, and the next chapter begins by telling the Corinthians to follow after charity (1 Corinthians 14:1). For the chapter itself, see The "Love Chapter": An Exposition of 1 Corinthians 13.

The best-known case is the prophecy of the suffering Servant. It does not begin at Isaiah 53:1 but three verses earlier, at Isaiah 52:13, where God says that his servant will be exalted. The fifty-third chapter goes on to speak of the same servant, despised and rejected and bearing the sins of many. Matthew Henry wrote that this prophecy, "which begins here and is continued to the end of the next chapter, points as plainly as can be at Jesus Christ". For the whole passage, see The Suffering Servant Prophecy: Isaiah 53.

Read the Passage, Then the Verse

The numbers are a reader's map of the Bible, and they have served the church well for four and a half centuries. They let anyone look up John 3:16 in a moment and find the same words in any translation. They should not decide where a reader starts and stops, though. When a verse begins with "therefore" or "for", read the verses before it. When a chapter ends, read a few verses into the next. Older Bibles that marked paragraphs help with this, and so does reading a whole chapter or a whole book at a sitting. For a simple way to begin, see How to Start Reading the Bible.

When Ezra read the Law to the people who had returned from exile, the Levites helped them understand it, and their aim was that the people should grasp what God had said.

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

Nehemiah 8:8
KJV

The numbers serve that same aim. The books they divide were received and handed down whole, as told in The Canon of Scripture: How We Got the Bible, and the divisions came later to help readers find their way through them. Every system of chapters and verses since then has left the words themselves untouched.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Isaiah 40:8
KJV