<P> The Hebrew Bible was also divided into some larger sections . In Israel the Torah (its first five books) were divided into 154 sections so that they could be read through aloud in weekly worship over the course of three years . In Babylonia it was divided into 53 or 54 sections (Parashat ha - Shavua) so it could be read through in one year . The New Testament was divided into topical sections known as kephalaia by the fourth century . Eusebius of Caesarea divided the gospels into parts that he listed in tables or canons . Neither of these systems corresponds with modern chapter divisions . (See fuller discussions below .) </P> <P> Chapter divisions, with titles, are also found in the 9th century Tours manuscript, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Lat. 3, the so - called Bible of Rorigo . </P> <P> Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro developed different schemas for systematic division of the Bible in the early 13th century . It is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based . </P> <P> While chapter divisions have become nearly universal, editions of the Bible have sometimes been published without them . Such editions, which typically use thematic or literary criteria to divide the biblical books instead, include John Locke's Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1707), Alexander Campbell's The Sacred Writings (1826), Daniel Berkeley Updike's fourteen - volume The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, Richard Moulton's The Modern Reader's Bible (1907), Ernest Sutherland Bates's The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (1936), The Books of the Bible (2007) from the International Bible Society (Biblica), Adam Lewis Greene's five - volume Bibliotheca (2014), and the six - volume ESV Reader's Bible (2016) from Crossway Books . </P>

Why were chapters and verses added in the bible