Beginner's Guide to Reading the Bible II

In modern society we think of the Bible as a single book. It is a singular volume of pages that we leaf through and read passages from without a thought that what we are really looking at is a library of books. The word Bible is borrowed from the Greek word, biblia which means scrolls or little books. The Bible is a library of little books that we can hold in our hand. The biblical library that Protestants use is a collection of sixty-six of such little books, which are listed in the front of any modern Bible. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have additional books in their Bibles called the apocrypha.

The books of the Bible have been written down over centuries by scribes who copied and preserved the biblical library. Over those years they developed a reference system to help the readers of the Bible locate specific items within the books. They divided each book into chapters, some short and some long, and marked numbers within the text that were larger than the text and easy to read - chapters. Each chapter is then divided into verses that generally run from one to two sentences in length. These verses build the chapters that are generally divided up based on subject matter or an event. By numbering these chapters and verses it is very easy to find and reference things within the Bible. References are written as Genesis 1:31 which would reference the book of Genesis, chapter 1 and verse 31. This verse begins, "And God saw everything that he had made...".