CHAPTER HEADINGS & SENTENCES

Edinburgh

One difficulty reading centuries’ old books is that, because of length, some sentences make little sense to us moderns. Antecedents tend to get lost in the crowd of verbosity. Chapter headings act like street signs and shorter sentences like stop signs. We must make a full stop and look both ways before proceeding. Periods give pause for thought. Like vintage cars, archaic words and complicated sentence structures may look impressive but surely the object of communication is to be understood by the ordinary person on the street.

Chapter headings and short sentences may also help the reader row their boat gently down your verbal stream of consciousness. Take Moses. He didn’t feed us a mess of verbal porridge. He feeds us the Word of God. In the opening chapters of the Bible, he has us spend a moment in eternity, in the presence of God. He then gets us look at God’s creation before landing us safely on planet Earth. Then we’re invited to walk around in a beautiful garden. Then he shows us his story’s props, two trees, before introducing us to his main characters, a man and then a woman. He tells us their names. Then the story unfolds.

Presbyterian theologian, Robert Lewis Dabney, gives us a sense of historical context to Moses’ writing, “Adam was contemporary with Methuselah 243 years, Methuselah with Noah 600 years (dying in the year of the flood) and Noah with Abram 58 years. Thus Abraham received the revelations of paradise through only two transmissions!"[1]

When Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible (Genesis to Deuteronomy) he made use of written records, books, and such like, that Noah had preserved from the Flood. E.g., pre-Deluge Genesis 5:1 states: “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam.”

In Genesis, Moses used ten books (called Toledoths) to serve as what we would call ‘chapter headings.’ The following are these ten books or ‘chapter headings’: This is the history of the heavens and the earth (Gen. 2:4); This is the book of the genealogy of Adam (5:1); This is the genealogy of Noah (6:9); The genealogy of the sons of Noah (10:1); The genealogy of Shem (11:10); The genealogy of Terah (11:27); The genealogy of Ishmael (25:12); The genealogy of Isaac (25:19); The genealogy of Esau (36:1, 9); The history of Jacob (37:2).

        And when it came to sentences, Moses used what is called the waw consecutive, i.e. the word ‘and’ to connect what comes after with what came before. It acts like our modern ‘full stop, new sentence’ formatting. Some Bibles translate the waw consecutive as ‘but’ or ‘then’ etc. to save the modern aversion to the repetitive usage of ‘and. However, read the opening chapters of ye olde King James Version (1611) to see the word ‘and’ get star billing!

Therefore, when writing, be mindful of your readership. Don’t needlessly and carelessly weary readers with what may be excellent content poorly presented. Think attractive chapter headings and pithy short sentences. Your readers will thank you.

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[1] Robert Lewis Dabney, Systematic Theology, (The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, Scotland, first published 1871, reprinted 1996), 445.