Bible Paragraph divisions

Getting this information out of an automated search would be difficult, if the digital copy of the Bible you have does not distinguish between paragraph breaks and other line breaks (e.g. breaks between lines of poetry).

Out of curiosity ... why would you want it?

It seems that your workflow would not really speed up from having a pre-compiled list of paragraphs.

You could do a copy and paste of whole books of the Bible, and then do it paragraph by painstaking paragraph.

Lee said:

It seems that your workflow would not really speed up from having a pre-compiled list of paragraphs.

You could do a copy and paste of whole books of the Bible, and then do it paragraph by painstaking paragraph.

I think he wants just the verse references for the paragraphs, not the Bible text itself, like he illustrated in his first post.

You know of course that the paragraph divisions are not in the original Hebrew and Greek. They are interpretive decisions made by the translators, and they will differ from translation to translation. If you're doing this for personal study, you are probably better off making those paragraph decisions yourself: decide which chunk to break off into its own bit to be summarized by you. It might be that in your Bible there are two or three paragraphs together which are just one sentence each, but you'd really like to treat them as all one unit. Or there might be a longer paragraph that you'd like to break up into two chunks for summarizing. You'll get more out of the study exercise if you do this level of detail yourself, I think.

Otherwise, you could open The Outline Bible or a commentary that divides up the text into chunks of about the size your looking for and copy the verse ranges from it. You'd have to delete the pericope names they've given for the divisions, so it might not be any less work than manually entering the verse ranges yourself.

Robert M. Warren said:

Hi Steve:

Here's an Excel file I fiddled with a few years ago for a project. Maybe it will help you.

1526.Pericopes.xls

That's awesome, Robert! Thank you for sharing it. You might want to cross-post it on the Files forum too (which is commonly used for sharing files, PBs and such), because I'm guessing there will be others who aren't following this thread who find it useful. That must have been a lot of work, and it will save others a great deal of time. I might use it myself as I've been wanting to work through making my own outline summary of the Bible as a way to ingrain its structure more in my mind.

Bruce Dunning said:

What is involved to make an xls file into a docx file?

Open the xls file.

Select All (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on Mac)

Copy

Create a new Word document

Paste

Save the docx file.

Voila! You're done.

I have made a few more corrections to the Excel file (too late to delete earlier version) and have created a .docx with milestones & headings.

1563.Pericopes.xls

2867.Pericopes PB.docx

Well Alabama with sunglasses, Tell us where ever you got the notion that the Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) has no paragraph divisions. Do you know Hebrew? Then you know that printed copies have minor paragraph seperations AND even major paragraph divisions--something that English books don't even use. (Electronic Hebrew Bibles have a sameq or a peh at the ends of the verse/paragraph.) Can you image reading ANY major piece of literature without paragraph marks? That would be preposterous. So why would the precious Word of God do something so ridiculous and be left open to personal interpretation? The English translators have taken their liberties and added crap (yes, crap) here and there and adjusted the paragraph divisions. (They will have their day in court.) But the hebrew Scriptures have divisions. Tons of them. And on top of that, every VERSE of the Hebrew Bible has an athnak, just to show you the middle of the verse. And then there are division marks (punctuation) down to the every single Hebrew word!!

The only thing that your wiki link does is confirm my facts; thank you. If you could read, it shows that the Hebrew Bible has paragraph marks. Obviously you don't read Hebrew or you wouldn't have jumped into this with your link (that only supports my point).

Speaking of the masoretes, if you look at a copy of The Great Isaiah scroll (part of the Dead Sea scrolls) you will see that it has paragraph marks (as do all of the pictures of the Hebrew texts in your wiki link). However, you wiki link is to the oldest complete copy of the Tanach, which happened to be found in Leningrad (and printed in 1008 AD). But the Isaiah Scroll is ONE thousand years older than it. And boo hoo for the liberals and the sceptics, nothing was different. The text was unchanged (except for tiny, insignificant things). The masoretes appeared six hundred years after the Dead Sea scrolls. Therefore, the paragraph marks were there BEFORE the masoretes.

Also, there are traditions--that I believe--that God, at Sinai, gave the text with the consonants, with the vowels and with all the punctuation that we have today. The masoretes only codied (or documented) what had already existed for centuries. They didn't add anything.

Back in June 2013, Steve Haworth asked about paragraph divisions for bible study purposes. Two people told him, "You know of course that the paragraph divisions are not in the original Hebrew and Greek." Because I just read these tonight, I decided to address these two individuals and their erroneous claims. You seemed to have received a copy and stuck your oar in. They were wrong and you seem to want to continue their errors.

Learn some Hebrew, read the wiki links that you sent me and look at the Dead Sea scrolls--the Hebrew has paragraph breaks!! And if you don't like any extra thoughts on my "high regard" of the Holy Scriptures, what are you doing here on earth?

I agree. Christians should not make personal attacks; that's why I didn't personally attack anyone. So please explain your point.

As for my part, Christians are here "on earth" to proclaim the Living God to this world and to proclaim the excellence of His Word and to lift it up HIGH before a blind generation. Unfortunately, from time to time, we see how other Christians are NOT doing that and so we need to point out their errors. And that is all I did. If Smith wishes to push against my corrections--remember, iron sharpens iron--that is her problem. All I then do was wonder why out loud; to wonder what her goal is "being here on earth". How someone takes that as a personal offense is beyond me. (Do you rip the pages out of your NT where Jesus calls some individuals "vipers"?)

Anyway, here is a link that shows, to everyone, that there are paragraph marks in this 2,100 year old copy of Isaiah.

dss.collections.imj.org.il

Obviously, the Holy Scriptures have always been written precisely and clearly. From this copy, even if you don't read Hebrew, you see clear paragraph divisions--even though you and others stated that there were not. And this is an old, beat up, cheap copy that the Essenes had out in the desert; think what the more expensive copies must have looked like.