The division of the books of the Bible into chapters and verses was introduced in translations to facilitate understanding. Originally, the books of the Bible were not divided into chapters or verses; each book was a continuous text from beginning to end. There were no punctuation marks between sentences—no periods, and even the words were often written without spaces, making a line appear as a single long word. This necessitated the division of the Bible into chapters, and chapters into paragraphs.
1. The Jews, from ancient times, began dividing each book of the Old Testament into small sections.
2. In the third century AD, Ammonius (Ammonius), a deacon from Alexandria, divided the four Gospels into several sections.
3. The one who divided the Bible into the chapters as we have them today was Cardinal Hugo in the year 1040 AD.
4. As for the division of chapters into verses, the first to do so in the Old Testament was the monk Eginus, who translated the Bible into Latin.
5. In 1545, Robert Estienne divided the chapters of the New Testament into verses as they are today.
The primary purpose of these divisions was to make it easier to reference and locate specific passages in the Holy Scriptures. These divisions are indeed helpful, although they sometimes separate phrases that ought to remain connected.
