here are a lot of Bible editions editions that superscript the verse numbers within a paragraph so they’re a lot less obtrusive.

This is part of what I like about my Oxford edition of the Bible.

ou don’t format it as poetry, so a lot of people don’t realize how much of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are poetry

And this is another part of what I like.

Like you, I think reading multiple translations is helpful in broadening understanding. I’m fine with having a standard text (the KJV), but I do not like how some people treat other translations as unclean. Given the frequency with which other translations are quoted in General Conference, I think this is clearly an erroneous stance.

We split texts into verses for ease of reference and study. Once you versify a text it’s a lot easier for people with different editions or copies to find the same passage. Versification can certainly change the way we read a text and think about it, but I think our problem of reading verses as discrete units is partly a typographical problem. There are a lot of Bible editions editions that superscript the verse numbers within a paragraph so they’re a lot less obtrusive.

Another problem is that the Hebrew Bible is very long and if you print it in two columns to save paper you don’t format it as poetry, so a lot of people don’t realize how much of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are poetry. Willis Barnstone says Yeshua as recorded in the Gospel of Mattai is one of the great world poets.

I’ve been reading the Jewish Publication Society translation of The Torah, and the versification looks pretty much the same, so it predates Christianity. Some of the footnotes in Willis Barnstone’s translation The New Covenant, Part 1, The Gospels and Apocalypse suggest that the verses indicate line breaks in the manuscripts they were versifying from.

Your comment about the Maori reading the Book of Mormon as a series of stories may mean that they don’t have an exegetical tradition like the western exegetical tradition. I’ll have a lot to say about the assumptions we make when we interpret texts in future postings.

In the FARMS mag several years back (2000?) they ran an article about the Maori. The gist was that the Maori read the BofM as a series of stories rather than a sequence of doctrinal verses and thus their take on it is quite different than the average Americans.

So I read through the Book of Mormon as quickly as I could, to try and gain a sense of its scope as story, as epic, et cetera. And it did provide a different sort of experience that has colored the way I’ve talked about the Book ever since.

One of the projects on my plate is a short-story collection that includes the KJV Esther. And you can bet I’ll be throwing out the verses and forming some more natural paragraphs.

Another thing about verses is how many readers define their reading by verse, whether in personal study or in a class. Taking part of a sentence alone in its own increases the likelihood of misinterpretation or no interpretation at all.