There are 929 chapters and 23,145 verses in the Old Testament. However, the ancient manuscripts of the Bible did not contain the chapter and verse divisions in the numbered form familiar to modern readers today. Some portions of the original texts were logically divided into parts following the Hebrew alphabet; 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 the book of Lamentations. There are other divisions from various sources which are different from what we use today.
The Hebrew Old Testament began to be put into sections before the Babylonian Captivity (586 BC) 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) the Law was put into 54 sections and 669 sub-divisions for reading.
It is presently unknown how early the Hebrew verse divisions were incorporated into the books that comprise the Biblical canon. However, it is beyond dispute that 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. 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 mark (:) 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 scholars attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus’s work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440.
The Hebrew Masoretic text of the Bible notes several different kinds of subdivisions within the biblical books:
(1) Verse endings
Most importantly are the verse endings. According to the Talmudic tradition, the division of the text into verses is of ancient origin. In masoretic versions of the Bible, the end of a verse is indicated by a small mark in its final word called a silluq (which means “stop”). Less formally, verse endings are usually also indicated by a two horizontal dots following the word with a silluq.
(2) Parashot
The Masoretic textual tradition also contains section endings called parashot, which are usually indicated by a space within a line (a “closed” section) or a new line beginning (an “open” section). The division of the text reflected in the parashot is usually thematic. Unlike chapters the parashot are not numbered, but some of them have special titles.
In early manuscripts (most importantly in Tiberian Masoretic manuscripts, such as the Aleppo codex) an “open” section may also be represented by a blank line, and a “closed” section by a new line that is slightly indented (the preceding line may also not be full). These latter conventions are no longer used in Torah scrolls and printed Hebrew Bibles. In this system the one rule differentiating “open” and “closed” sections is that “open” sections must always begin at the beginning of a new line, while “closed” sections never start at the beginning of a new line.
(3) Sedarim
Another division of the biblical books found in the masoretic text is the division of the sedarim. This division is not thematic, but is almost entirely based upon the quantity of text. For the Torah, this division reflects the triennial cycle of reading that was practiced by the Jews of Babylon.
Absence of chapters
The current division of the Bible into chapters and the verse numbers within the chapters has no basis in any ancient textual tradition. Rather, they are medieval Christian inventions. They were later adopted by many Jews as well, as technical references within the Hebrew text. Such technical references became crucial to medieval rabbis in the historical context of forced debates with Christian clergy (who used the chapter and verse numbers), especially in late medieval Spain.
The earliest extant Jewish manuscript to note the chapter divisions dates from 1330, and the first printed edition was in 1516 (several earlier masoretic Bibles did not note the chapters).
Since then, all printed Hebrew Bibles note the chapter and verse numbers out of practical necessity. However, ever since the 1961 Koren edition, most Jewish editions of the Bible have made a systematic effort to relegate chapter and verse numbers to the margins of the text, as an indication that they are foreign to the masoretic tradition.
