Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

Where we get started, we'll pick up at the beginning of St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews

Chapter 7.

And really, as we've seen before, the places we stop, even though we try to stop it at chapter

breaks, we've seen that the chapter breaks we stop, even though we try to stop it at chapter breaks.

We've seen that the chapter breaks, of course, were added much later and are, in some cases, fairly arbitrary.

And that's definitely the case a lot here in Hebrews.

We've already seen a little bit of that.

Part of that is because, as we've said now, repeatedly, this isn't really a letter in the same way

that St. Paul's other epistles are letters.

And so with St. Paul's other epistles, since it's a letter, he'll move from one topic to another.

And that's a good place to put a chapter break, right, if you're coming along later and putting them in.

Whereas St. Paul's Episal of the Hebrews, as we said, is sort of more like homiletic or sermon type material.

It has a more rhetorical style.

And if you think about that, if someone gives a sermon or a speech or an oration,

and then you have the text of it and you are trying to break it into chapters,

there might be some places where there's a shift or change it.

It's kind of obvious. But there might be other places where there's a shift or change it. It's kind of obvious.

But there might be other places where you just have to kind of sort of pick a spot,

you know, based on length if you want the chapters to be of similar length.

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