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Teaching Series 1 - About the Bible
Part 2: Chapter and Verse
 n the year 586 B.C., the Torah (Law)
was the most important writing for the Jews. It was written in
Hebrew, the language of the Jews of Judah. In that year, the
Babylonians destroyed the state of Judah and exiled the ruling class
Jews to Babylon. This is the beginning of what is now known as
the Diaspora (Dispersion). This is the basis for Psalm 137: 1,
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion."
Not all of the Jews who were driven
out went to Babylon. Many families traveled to Egypt, a haven for
the Jews throughout their history. And although we know
that the exiles in Babylon returned to the promised land (the books of
Ezra and Nehemiah), not all who left returned. In the course of
time, the Babylonians were destroyed by the Persians, who were beaten
back to the Euphrates River by the Greeks. The Greeks were strong
enough for long enough to make their language "universal," that is, the
language of commerce and everyday living.
For the Jews, this meant that they
needed a way to make the Torah understandable to the generations born
in exile, Jews who only spoke Greek. So, between 200 B.C.
and 100 B.C., seventy-two Hebrew scholars in the court of Ptolemy II
translated the Torah and the other writings of the history and the
prophets from Hebrew to Greek. The legend is that the scholars
all sat down and wrote in Greek for seventy days and agreed with each
other so that no changes were necessary. If this is true, then
this was a miraculous occasion on several levels. In any event,
this translation in Greek became known as the Septuagint, the Greek
word for "seventy." The scholarly shorthand for the Septuagint is
LXX, the number seventy in Roman numerals. The importance of LXX
is that it includes the apocrypha and preserves the history of the Jews
between the times of the Old and New Testaments.
Because of the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls, we know that around 100 B.C., another group of Hebrew
scholars decided that the holy writings in Hebrew should not be
lost. They began to translate the writings into Hebrew with
pronunciation helps. The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit three different
systems used; the Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Tiberian.
The Tiberian system was finally accepted as the standard. This
translation came to be known as the Masoretic Text, or MT. Masora
means "tradition", thus identifying the agenda of the scholars.
The helpful marks in this translation are called diacritical
marks. They help us know how words have been spoken in Hebrew
since before Christ. The MT was finally completed in the tenth
century A.D.
In the tenth century then we have
two different versions of the Old Testament. Although most of the
scholars who were employed interpreting and discuss the Old Testament
were Christians, there were also small pockets of Jewish scholarship in
places like Tiberius, next to the Sea of Galilee in Israel. In order
for all of these scholars to have a way to talk intelligently to one
another about these scriptures, a system of numbering the thoughts,
ideas, and events of the Old Testament was agreed upon. The
numbering of chapters and verses was done with as much thought to
context and meaning as was possible. But the system is not
perfect; and in further translations the system sometimes requires that
sentences in some languages be broken into different numbered
verses. (More about this issue in another article.)
In the 1260's A.D., the Roman Catholic
Church had the Bible translated from all of the original languages into
Latin to form the Bible known as the Vulgate. It took another
couple of hundred years for the Vulgate to have chapter and verse
designations. The first complete Old and New Testament Bible to appear
with chapters and verses was printed in Latin in 1555 A.D. by the
French printer Robert Estienne. The first Bible in English was
printed in 1560 and is known as the Geneva Bible.
Next time: About the Bible - Stationery Then and Now
To God be the glory,
Jude Moore,
judemoore7@aol.com
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