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What a Scripture Portion Is

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What a Scripture Portion Is

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A scripture portion is a named, citable subdivision of a scripture, the unit a tradition itself uses to refer to part of its own text rather than the whole of it. The weekly Torah reading portions of Judaism, each one carrying its own Hebrew name drawn from an early word in the passage, are the clearest example, but the type covers the same idea wherever a tradition has settled on its own way of dividing a long text into named or numbered pieces that can be read, studied and cited on their own.

The atlas records what portion of the larger work each entry covers, which text it belongs to, and enough of its content to place it, without reproducing the scripture itself at length. This is distinct from a Passage entry, which quotes a short, specific excerpt for its own wording; a scripture portion is the larger unit the passage sits inside, the chapter rather than the line. Grouping entries this way lets a reader move from a specific verse to the whole reading it belongs to, and from there to the text it was drawn from.

The atlas records a scripture portion's own internal structure where a tradition marks one, its main themes or events, and how it relates to the portions read immediately before and after it, since a cycle of readings is usually built to move through an entire text over a fixed span of time rather than to be read out of order.

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Sources
The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997View the Source
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