It always looked so weird to me, like, who not just read the Bible like a proper book instead of having all of those numbering?
I guess it’s because it makes easy to find some specific line? But that is from an academic perspective instead of something you would put in a faith book?
When did that started and why they put all the numbering?
Bible history is fascinating. Michael from Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube broke it all down from the original texts (as old as possible) to the King James Version. youtu.be/fnlp3--RG3c?si=T01T4emDeT6i6s4-
Your guess is spot on. It makes it easy to reference. If you look at Wikipedia, with articles and such it cites them by ISBN and page number. Since the Bible is so widely translated into not only different languages, but different versions within languages, as well as printed with varying font sizes, etc, page numbers for such an important book simply wouldn’t happen. Surprisingly, numbering was only introduced as late as 1555. As for the books, they are generally separated into what they were found as. So Matthew is the Gospel written by St Matthew the Evangelist, John is the Gospel written by St John the Evangelist, 1 Corinthians is St Paul the Apostle’s first known letter to the church in Corinth, etc.
For easy indexing. Lots of influential literary works have this. There’s a universal standard indexing for both the works of Plato and Shakespeare, for example.
Took a humanities class on the development of religion. As another poster commented, the Bible is a collection of books and stories that can be found even on other religions and older texts. Given that this a collection of works dating back over thousands of years, my recollection is more of generalization that can point to what to look for rather than provide extreme specifics.
Take the Odyssey, it can be compared to books in the Bible such as David and Goliath, the flood, etc. There is others such as the epic of Gilgamesh demonstrating the use of gods giving humans epic powers and fighting one eyed evil giants. The use of daemons converted into demons in the Bible. For example, It is said a daemon is someone of 2 genders in one body, similar to a hermaphrodie however one part was holy (iirc), and would serve to be a useful companion rather than an evil force against you.
Now imagine you got all these motherfucking books everyone else made.
I’ll title my small book: Ye Old Plagiarism
One, the Greeks fucking hated writing in anything other than pentameter or stuff like that. Naturally poems and the like must have their lines numbered.
Two, the Roman’s also hated writing normally, expect lines and wacky rhyming schemes.
Three, the Bible is written and it ended up looking like this.
Another thing is, don’t look at what post biblical professors are saying. The guy from Bible Odyssey is focusing on why we continued that same stupid scheme from the Torah all the way to the KJV of the Bible. James Louden has books that focus on the similarities from the absolutely oldest pieces of text found (Sumerian Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Iliad, etc) and can point you into the direction that you are looking for.
On the point of pentameter and other ancient writing quirks. It’s because writing was expensive and not really that common. Ink, paper, quill. It all had to be painstakingly made by hand. Then all the training on reading and writing was a huge time investment as well. So it was relegated to the high classes. And slaves, they used slaves as scribes and basically as personal computers.
So, most of culturally relevant works were actually poems. Lacking writing tools, long passages of texts are hard to memorize. But, poems in regular rhyme and accompanied by structured melodies are actually very easy to memorize. The Odyssey was one such a song.
A master could teach his disciples the words and melody of extraordinarily long passages of information. Names, history, dates, myths, moral essays, by teaching the song. Performing the different passages several times allowed memorization and then they could perform this either for entertainment or for study and analysis via rethorical discussion. This oral tradition is how we have theater plays, stories and songs from 5 thousand years ago. We are pretty certain today that Homer didn’t wholly originally wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey. He belonged to this oral tradition and put it down into writing. Something that might have been seen as unnecessary at the time, for text was relegated to legal documents and treatises and court proceedings.
EDIT: Here’s a practical demonstration. Write down the lyrics for Mr. Brightside. Chances are that you know them by heart.
Beautifully put. It’s all about it being an astounding play (story/poem) that was meant to be seen by aristocratic wealth and written almost as an afterthought, giving us all these different interpretations. And there’s the instruction sets that are also added in, which in my opinion is what made religion the ugly thing it is today, controlling. Thankfully humanity kept storytelling, book and playwriting well and alive thousands of years into the future.
It’s a fantasy story as old as written history, it’s just fun to know why people idealize it, where it came from, and what it really means.
They were mostly old Greek instructions on how to farm and not die and shit. Wash yourself at daylight. Don’t eat shrimp or pork cause it’ll kill you. Don’t be wasteful with your harvest, you’ll need food in the winter.
Add thousands of years into people blindly following these unhh… recommendations, and you get crazed fucks crying on their knees begging you not to be gay/abort/etc.
I don’t know where the Bible’s numbering in particular comes from, but it’s common in ancient texts. It helped with navigating long works before the printing press gave us exact pagination.
Firstly, the Bible, as we know it, is a collection of books and sections that were written over several thousand years.
I guess it’s because it makes easy to find some specific line? But that is from an academic perspective instead of something you would put in a faith book?
You have this backward. It’s very important for texts of proselytizing religions to be easy to navigate and repeat.
It also facilitates two things. First, hermeneutics. Which is the art of overanalizing text ad nauseam until you can manufacture new meaning that wasn’t put there by the author in the first place, by sheer force of dubious rethoric. And secondly taking individual lines out of context to support fringe and contradictory statements.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to be clever or not but do you really view that any different than referring to poetry by stanza/line? Or books by page number/paragraph/line? The Bible has been written, rewritten, and edited thousands of times, it makes no sense to say “page 121, paragraph 3” when quoting from it
I imagine if your book got translated into hundreds of different languages, eventually people would add numbers to the verses. Sometimes the translated version is not a great translation to the original languages intent, so it’s easy to reference the verse number across other translations or compare it across languages
because it gets quoted a lot. Some Christian religions go to an anual cycle during mass, where the whole thing is read few verses every day, so you have to brake it down
Add comment