It always looked so weird to me, like, who not just read the Bible like a proper book instead of having all of those numbering?
I guess it’s because it makes easy to find some specific line? But that is from an academic perspective instead of something you would put in a faith book?
When did that started and why they put all the numbering?
Your guess is spot on. It makes it easy to reference. If you look at Wikipedia, with articles and such it cites them by ISBN and page number. Since the Bible is so widely translated into not only different languages, but different versions within languages, as well as printed with varying font sizes, etc, page numbers for such an important book simply wouldn’t happen. Surprisingly, numbering was only introduced as late as 1555. As for the books, they are generally separated into what they were found as. So Matthew is the Gospel written by St Matthew the Evangelist, John is the Gospel written by St John the Evangelist, 1 Corinthians is St Paul the Apostle’s first known letter to the church in Corinth, etc.
So many verses. When will it get to the chorus?
They got rid of the chorus due to it Pagan Greek origins.
The four Gospels :P
It sure makes it easy for religious people to pick out tiny experts and use them out of context.
Excerpts*
I don’t know where the Bible’s numbering in particular comes from, but it’s common in ancient texts. It helped with navigating long works before the printing press gave us exact pagination.
pagination
i learned a new word today, thank you
I don’t know where the Bible’s numbering in particular comes from
1560 Genevra. Before that, only the chapters were numbered. Probably a consequence of Protestantism, but even Catholic bibles adopted it.
It helped with navigating long works before the printing press gave us exact pagination.
It’s still helpful, even nowadays. For example if I told you to find in Sermones the quote at 1.2.69-71 (1st book, 2nd part, lines 69 to 71), you could easily do it. Note how the numbering system is similar in spirit to the one in the Bible - except that the books get an abbreviation instead of a number.
For easy indexing. Lots of influential literary works have this. There’s a universal standard indexing for both the works of Plato and Shakespeare, for example.
Bible history is fascinating. Michael from Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube broke it all down from the original texts (as old as possible) to the King James Version. https://youtu.be/fnlp3--RG3c?si=T01T4emDeT6i6s4-
It’s to facilitate citing random verses out of context to support whatever you need it to.
Notice that we write laws and contracts in the same way. The bible was both. It was used to settle disagreements and to sentence people.
Guess what else is divided like that. That’s right, it’s the Quran. And maybe the Torah too, I don’t know.
That’s just a trope of religious texts.
