The Wilderness Before the Throne: David 13 | Pastor Allen Nolan

But sometime around 1227 AD, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, divided each book of the Bible into chapters.

His goal in doing so was to allow readers to locate passages of Scripture more easily and to help facilitate the study of the Bible.

Then in 1448 AD, a Jewish rabbi by the name of Nathan divided the Hebrew text into verses.

So in 1448, all the books of the Old Testament were divided into chapters and verses.

Well, about 107 years later, in 1555, Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus, divided the books of the New Testament into chapters and verses.

And then five years later, in 1560, the Geneva Bible adopted the standardized chapter and verse divisions, which set the precedent of using the same chapter and verse divisions for nearly every subsequent chapter.

bible translation so it doesn't matter what translation you're using if i tell you to turn to a certain chapter in the bible then you'll know where to go to and you can find it easily if i give you a verse reference you can do the same thing and that was the purpose of adding the chapters and verses it was to make sure that we could find reference and memorize passages of scripture more easily The only problem with dividing the books of the Bible into chapters and verses is it tends to create a break in the natural flow of the text.

So if we're not careful, this breaking of the text means that we take things out of context or we start reading in the middle of a story or we stop reading in the middle of the story.

And that's what most people do.

And you'll find scholars even doing this.

They'll read chapter 19, and they'll discuss chapter 19, and then they get to chapter 20, and they shut everything off, and they start in chapter 20 like they're starting a brand new story.

And the Bible was not meant to be like that.

In fact, when I'm studying the Bible, what I like to do is I like to read it, the whole book in one setting.

And I like to read it with no chapters and no verses.

That helps me to discover which pericope are the passages that I wanna study and how I wanna divide it up.

But that's what you need to understand, that when you get to chapter 20 in 1 Samuel, And you start in verse number one, what you're really doing is you're starting in the middle of the story, which means that you're not going to have the background information you need to truly understand what's taking place in this part of the story.

Not unless you read chapter 19 first and then keep reading when you get to chapter 20 and you read it as one complete story.

Now, lucky for you, as we go through chapter 20, I'm going to explain the context by flipping back to chapter 19 as needed.