When books were hand-written, anything that took longer to do was more expensive: extra colors, pictures, or scripts that required longer to write. This printed book is attempting to incorporate elements from a very fancy handwritten version. So there is a luxury association to these sorts of things.

It looks here like it's setting off the first letter of each verse, rather than having the verses numbered. Because sentences start and end at different places in different languages, finding a specific verse requires the book marking where one ends and a new one begins.

The red marks are used to decorate (or maybe indicate) capital letters.