CLOSED / OPEN — the Masoretic text's own paragraph marks, printed in this translation as {S} and {P} at the point where they fall (and as {ס} and {פ} on the Spanish pages, using the Hebrew letters the scribes used). ⭐ They are the oldest divisions the Hebrew Bible has, and they are not the chapter numbers. A petuchah, an OPEN section, ends the line where it stands and starts the next section on a fresh line, leaving the rest of the line blank — the heavier break of the two. A setumah, a CLOSED section, leaves a gap of a few words inside the line and carries on. Both are older than the chapter and verse numbers by roughly a thousand years: the chapters a reader knows were fitted to the Latin Bible in the thirteenth century, while these marks are in the scribal tradition the Masoretes inherited, and the Dead Sea scrolls already have them. ⚠ Which is why they are worth watching where the two disagree. Deuteronomy 22 is a chapter of short unconnected laws, and its thirteen marks — twelve setumah and the heavier petuchah after v5 — are the text saying where one law stops and the next begins, which the running verse numbers cannot show. ⚠ They also cut across the chapter boundary the numbering imposes, and Deuteronomy 13:1 is the sharpest case on these pages: do not add to it, nor take from it is the LAST verse of chapter 12 in every English Bible and the FIRST of chapter 13 in the Hebrew — and the Masoretes then put a petuchah, their heavier mark, immediately after it, so the sentence is joined to neither side. Two traditions attach it to two different chapters and the scribes attach it to nothing. ⚠ Do not read them as punctuation. They divide SENSE, not sentences, and a translation that turned them into paragraph breaks would be making a claim the marks do not make. → first discussed at Deut 22:3