If you've ever waded hip deep into publication technology, you can see how the 2nd CE heading has moved down, down, down, down all the way to the individual word level, in something like a DITA `conref` where the individual word is a reference.

Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for so long before you're not a document anymore, and if you're not a document . . well, what are you doing? Why are we here? You've built a conceptual box that's better done in an actual programming language.

But no one's going to argue about the utility of headings (hmm except for the DITA architects, who have disposed of it in favor of a nested transclusion of `topicrefs`). This sort of article is always fascinating, although it is just as concerned with fiction prose.

Off topic, the following would prove darkly prophetic:

Early modern intellectuals like Robert Boyle and John Locke would even rail against Biblical chaptering: Boyle complained of its ‘inconvenient Distinction’, which ‘hath sometimes Sever’d Matters that should have been left United’; Locke for his part despaired that the system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’ that not only do the ‘Common People take the Verses usually for distinct aphorisms’, but even the educated have their powers of memory enfeebled.

[1] I'm calling out DITA but it's also mechanisms in S1000D and DocBook, and you can do the same in Asciidoc (include directive to region) or ReStructuredText (same). The XML specs are clunkier, but the basic concept is the same.

> he system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’

I don't get the problem. You never hear them, and when you read them yourself, you also just ignore them. When your starting at a chapter, just read the last few verses of the previous to get the context.

I like the verses.

How else could I deep-link to a total banger line like Matthew 25:40?