Making Aliyah?

Rebecca Schenker asks:

During kriat hatorah this Shabbas i noticed that shishi starts with the one pasuk about Binyamin from Yaakov's bracha and then continues with "eleh hashvatim..." My question is why isn't that one pasuk about Binyamin put in the end of chamishi after Yaakov's bracha to Yosef and the other brothers?

While I don't yet have an answer to this question, it did get me thinking and inquiring about the עליות.  While the number of קרואים is brought down in the gemara, where they were broken up is a far later institution.  Originally, the Torah was completed in a three year cycle, which of course meant that each week, and each עולה read much less than we do now.  Bavel, and then Eretz Yisrael later shifter to the annual cycle, but the עולים would each read for himself, and seemingly would decide where to stop - with certain restrictions about where you could not stop or start an aliyah.  While I haven't traced it yet precisely, the markers that we now have in our chumashim seems to be a much later innovation.

I noticed that this past week's parsha seemed to have oddly placed aliyah seperations - foregoing the natural paragraph breaks, and stopping sometimes even in the middle of a sentence (see shishi).  The ba'al koreh reminded me that a big factor in the selection of aliyot is that we don't want to start or end with פורעניות - bad news.  Since each of the natural sections ended with Paroh refusing to allow the Jews to go, they had limited options.