Twenty-first century Christians of every stripe, as well as scholars with or without any faith at all, assume a Bible that is divided into thousands of distinct verses. They think and operate with those divisions as of second nature. It is considered axiomatic that to learn a Bible passage is to learn to cite its book, chapter, and verse, and sometimes even half verse. In written form these citations follow specific rules of style. And with oddly clinical precision, some preachers even include these references in their preaching, as though they were citing case law, or maybe canon law. As I say, thinking of the Bible in this way is now axiomatic. Axioms are useful, but ought to be examined and questioned anew in each generation. For too long we have forgotten this. The fact that our bibles today are atomized, disintegrated, hacked, into thousands of little pieces, is largely due to the efforts of Robert Estienne, who published his work in the 1550s. There were attempts in this dir