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?
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.
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
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 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
You don't need to write it like this. Just write normally (prose or poetry, your choice), and other people will fragment your text this way, while either discussing it [proto-]academically or looking for hidden stuff in it.
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.
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.
I don’t know where the Bible’s numbering in particular comes from
1560 Genevra. Before that, only the chapters were numbered. Probably a consequence of Protestantism, but even Catholic bibles adopted it.
It helped with navigating long works before the printing press gave us exact pagination.
It's still helpful, even nowadays. For example if I told you to find in Sermones the quote at 1.2.69-71 (1st book, 2nd part, lines 69 to 71), you could easily do it. Note how the numbering system is similar in spirit to the one in the Bible - except that the books get an abbreviation instead of a number.
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.
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. https://youtu.be/fnlp3--RG3c?si=T01T4emDeT6i6s4-
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.
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.
I apologise for the incoming off-topic... it's just that you mentioned Latin works, I fucking love it.
Two, the Roman’s also hated writing normally, expect lines and wacky rhyming schemes.
It's less that they "hated writing normally", and more that texts were made for a specific purpose and target audience, and the ones written "normally" didn't catch much attention. But they do exist - and we have surviving counter-examples, like
Caesar's De Bello Gallico - he was being concise and clear. It's a military report, not fancy pants poetry.
anything Cicero - he wrote a spaghetti, but he wasn't writing something catchy-sounding so the masses would remember and follow it, it was mostly philosophy geared towards educated speakers. The content mattered more than the form.
But not even for poetry the Romans used wacky rhyming schemes. Rhymes in Latin sound boring, because most words will end with a handful of sounds - it's too easy to pick a word that rhymes with another. Instead they did some fancy stuff with the metrics, capitalising on short vs. long syllables to create aesthetic effects. I'll exemplify it with one of my favourite poems. Bolded syllables are long, the others are short:
Catullus V
Vī·uā·mus mea Les·bia, at·que a·mē·mus (LLLS LSLS SLL)
then, when we will have made many thousand kisses,
we will throw them into confusion, lest we know,
or lest anyone bad be able to envy
when he knows there to be so many kisses.
All verses have exactly 11 metric syllables, even if a few of them require you to elide an ⟨e⟩ before another vowel. Note the general pattern (L = long, S = short):
All verses start with LLLS (spondee, then trochee).
Most verses follow it with either SLSL (two iambs) or LLSL (spondee, then iamb).
Most verses end in SLL (iamb, then a "dangling" long).
Why "most"? Because there are exceptions. And they're likely there because the author was playing with the rhythm alongside what the "lyric I" is saying:
the first verse is trying to get Lesbia's attention, so the middle uses SLSL (two trochees) because they sound faster and more playful.
the third verse ends with LLL (spondee+long). It's like someone saying emphatically "screeeeww thooose guuuys". It makes sense when you look at what the verse says - that the opinion of those old guys shouldn't matter a single as/"penny".
in the sixth verse, instead of a "dangling" long syllable, you got a short one. It ends abruptly - just like our lives, and that's exactly what the verse talks about.
You'll also see this sort of attention to the metric foot in other Roman works, like the Aeneid; except that the effect that Virgil was seeking was completely different from Catullus above, it was more like a "shut up, I'm going to tell you something important and profound". But still no rhymes.
This is right on topic!!! I love you for knowing these things :)
I think we read Cicero’s De Republica and I remember Louden speaking about the music of the spheres. It tore me up to think that thousands of years ago (despite being geocentric and not knowing about the vacuum of space) someone might’ve had the insight to know about the sounds of the early universe.
Here is black hole making funny noises, not the ethereal sounds we were promised but nonetheless sound ooOoOo
And I do remember Louden saying exactly that! That the narrator gave a sense of somber importance where the audience is expected to listen with great concern as we’re about to listen a great tale of a great man and what he did to anger the gods so.
We drew many comparisons but I think I remember one being that the story opens like that in the Odyssey I think? Or maybe one of Eurepedes or Sophocles plays where they use muses and a chorus kind of as an “audience” of sorts to demonstrate the seriousness and invested interest of the public.
I’m obviously not as well versed (pun intended) as you are but it was great to talk about this once again. I might give De Bello Gallico a read since it’s just a report, nothing with too much allegory, being I can’t ask my long deceased professor questions.
Any preferred translations? All I have is Latimore translations for the texts I’ve mentioned hahahaha
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.
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
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.