Thessalonian Faith

Segmentation

Going with the flow, naturally

The Bible is not just a random assortment of ideas. It follows a clear structure that conveys God’s message in an organized manner. Holy Spirit1 lays out His case through a logical series of connected thoughts. As we study the Bible, we need to follow His reasoning to understand His message.

The structure of the Bible that we are most familiar with is its organization by books, chapters, and verses.  This is, however, an artificial structure that provides little value beyond identifying or finding particular passages in the Bible. It does nothing to help us follow God’s flow of thought.

By recognizing the natural, literary structures of the Bible, we can discover and follow God’s logical progression of related thoughts and discern His message for us.  We do this through a process called Segmentation – identifying the various parts of a passage called segments and their relationship to each other.

“The structure of a passage is the main key to interpreting it well, understanding it rightly, and applying it faithfully to our lives.”

Jon Nielson, Understanding God’s Word:
An Introduction to Interpreting the Bible
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), 65.

The process of segmentation plunges us into the details of a Bible passage, helping us answer the three critical questions of every Bible study:

  • What does the passage say? (Read)
  • What did the passage mean to people in its day? (Relate)
  • What is the message of the passage for people today? (Respond)

The segmentation study process is both an art and a science, requiring both subjective and objective analysis of the study passage. There is no one right method or result to segmenting a passage. The key is to read the passage frequently, thoughtfully and prayerfully in order to discern the author’s flow of thought. 

BibleProject calls these structures Literary Styles. They rightly say, “To better understand the Bible, we have to first learn to recognize the different literary styles”2. They have identified three literary styles used in the Bible: Narrative3, Poetry4 and Prose Discourse5.

Learn more from their video on Literary Styles here:
https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/literary-styles-bible/

Click the button of your choice
to see details about a particular Literary Structure

Narrative
Poetry*
Prose Discourse

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Footnotes:

  1. 2 Peter 1:21 ↩︎
  2. https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/literary-styles-bible/ ↩︎
  3. a spoken or written account of connected events; a story ↩︎
  4. a type of literature typically written in verse that uses figurative language, or language that can have different meanings from what is literally said, to give multiple shades of meaning to a word or a phrase ↩︎
  5. a writing style that uses clear language to convey ideas, arguments, or instructions ↩︎