Line Breaks in the Bible

One-third of the Bible is written in poetry.  It would follow, then, that a devoted student of the Bible would study carefully the nature of biblical prosody in order to mine every possible nuance of divine truth from the rich caverns of God's word.  But the reality is that few Christians even realize they are reading poetry when they approach, say, the book of Psalms, let alone make the time to understand its devices.Biblical poetry is a deep and complicated study, one that would take several articles to explore.  For now, I would like to limit this discussion to the fundamental question of line breaks in the Bible.One disadvantage of the King James Version is that it does not make a distinction between the prose and poetry of the text.  The Revised Version (NT: 1881, OT: 1885), known in the U.S. as the American Standard Version, was the first English Bible to typeset biblical poetry in indented poetic lines.  This precedent has been followed by most modern translations in recent years.It should be pointed out that, as far as we know, line breaks did not exist in the original Hebrew manuscripts.  However, as Robert Lowth argued in his monumental work, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), there is a definite balancing of thought in Hebrew poetry.  This "sense rhythm," as it is sometimes called, is reflected in the Masoretic text on which most modern translations of the Old Testament are based.Furthermore, the inspired writers of biblical poetry wrote with great passion, and, as Merril Unger has pointed out, unconsciously produced the phenomena which later developed into more definite ideas of meter.  Just because these writers predated the study of formal meter in poetry, that doesn't mean we should not seek out the natural rhythms that flowed from the expressions of their emotions.Perhaps the reason most Bible readers ignore line breaks in their Bibles is because they can be pretty confusing.  Most of us like to have as many tools as possible in our Bibles--chain references, two column formats, footnotes, page numbers, chapter and verse divisions, headings, etc.  All of this crowds the page, which is bad for poetry.  To compensate for this, translations that give attention to poetic lines use a system of indentation and line breaks that is somewhat complicated and, as I have discovered, never explained in the preface to their versions.The majority of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, the balancing of thought in verse so that one line is an echo of another.  Deeper meaning occurs to the reader as he meditates upon the relationship of the lines.  As Lowth pointed out, parallelism takes three basic forms: synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic.  Psalm 19:1 is an excellent example of synonymous parallelism:

     The heavens declare the glory of God,and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (ESV)

The second part (also called the second colon) repeats what is said in the first colon, only in different wording that provokes the reader's meditation.  This is an example of a bicolon (parallelism with two cola, or parts).  Sometimes tricola appear in which the verse occurs in three parts (cf. Ps. 18:35).  It is important to understand this before trying to dicipher all those line breaks and indentations in your Bible.As a rule, each verse, or thought, begins with one indentation.  A line with two indentations signifies the second colon.  This is plain in the example cited above.  However, three indentations occur in many examples, such as in the following bicola from Psalm 137.

     If I forget you, O Jerusalem,let my right hand forget itsskill!Let my tongue stick to the roof ofmy mouth,if I do not remember you,if I do not set Jerusalemabove my highest joy! (ESV)

In the first bicolon, "let my right hand" begins the second part of the verse.  "Skill" is indented three times because it is merely the rest of the second line, not a new colon.  The same thing happens with "my mouth" in the second bicolon.  All of this is necessary because of cramped space on the page.Here is what it would look like if the translators did not have to work around two columns and a chain-reference down the middle of the page:

     If I forget you, O Jerusalem,let my right hand forget its skill!Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,if I do not remember you,if I do not set Jerusalemabove my highest joy!

Now the reader can plainly see the three bicola. The meaning is clearer, but the format would never work in a two column Bible.Here's another example from Habbakuk 3:17-18:

     Though the fig tree should notblossom,nor fruit be on the vines,the produce of the olive failand the fields yield no food,the flock be cut off from the foldand there be no herd in the stalls,yet I will rejoice in the Lord;I will take joy in the God of mysalvation. (ESV)

If it were not for the three indentations in line two, the reader would think "blossom" was the second part of the verse.  The same goes for "salvation" in the last line.This discussion may seem overly technical, but I believe it is very important to the understanding of the poetry of God's word.  The Lord would not have couched his will in poetry unless he regarded it as an essential and effective way of communicating it to us.  That places a burden upon me as a believer to learn how the poetry of the Bible works.  Discussions of imagery, rhythm, and parallelism are important to this, but all of it begins with a basic understanding of the line breaks in our Bibles.