I was wondering who created the division into Torah Portions? What was it based on? Was it done before or after the introduction of verses and chapters?
Hi! I don’t know exactly when the portions were divided, but the Talmud says that they used to follow either a three-year or a one-year cycle in reading the Torah. Presumably the one-year cycle was divided by our portions. So that would have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it might predate that time.The division into verses is part of the original Torah. Part of the Torah that G-d gave to Moses was information on how to read it, and you can’t really read it without the verses.
What we call chapters is not a Jewish division at all; it was done by Christian clergy to help them to study the Bible. It was eventually used even in Jewish Bibles for convenience’s sake. However, there is another type of “chapter”, which is the division of the Torah by the breaks (called “p’suchos” and “s’tumos”) in the writing. That is, there are places where there is a big space in the middle of the line, or at the beginning of a line, and they also tend to divide things up by subject. Those breaks were also part of the original Torah written by Moses.
Best wishes,
Michoel Reach