Chapter and Verse

Many years ago I gave a talk at my church on the Bible. My handout had citations for many biblical passages and a woman came up to me after the talk to ask me how to use the citations. This inspired me to give a follow-up talk called The Bible: An Owner’s Manual. The first section was how to look up a passage in the Bible.

While it may seem a simple matter to look up a specific book of the Bible and then find the appropriate chapter and verse, it can sometimes get quite complicated.

A Book By Any Other Name

Biblical citations consist of an abbreviation for the name of the book of the Old or New Testament, followed by numbers representing the chapter and the verse. These two numbers are separated either by a colon or a period.

Unfortunately, there’s no standard set of abbreviations for each biblical book. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, could be abbreviated as Matt or Mt. Also, some books have more than one name:

• Ecclesiastes is sometimes called Qoheleth
• Song of Songs is also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles
• Sirach is also known as Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus
• Revelation is also called The Apocalypse

With no standardization for abbreviation or name, ambiguity arises. In the figure below, is “Eccles” in the biblical citation supposed to be “Ecclesiastes” or “Ecclesiasticus”? Unless a book provides a table for the abbreviations it uses, you are on your own.

A bookmark that was given to me years ago. I recall it took me a long time to identify this passage in the Bible. 

There are only 12 chapters in Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach) has 51 chapters, but it is not a book found in the Protestant or Jewish canon. You will only find it in Catholic or Ecumenical versions of the bible. In an Ecumenical version, it will be in a special section between the Old and New Testatments, but in a Catholic bible it will be listed with the other Wisdom books.

The quote that appears in my bookmark is closest to Sir 42:21 in an 1899 Catholic translation called Douay-Rheims. Here is the relevant passage (vv. 20-22):

20 No thought escapeth him, and no word can hide itself from him.
21 He hath beautified the glorious works of his wisdom: and he Is from eternity to eternity, and to him nothing may be added,
22 Nor can he be diminished, and he hath no need of any counsellor.

Here is the same passage in a modern Catholic translation (NABRE):

20 He lacks no understanding; no single thing escapes him.
21 He regulates the mighty deeds of his wisdom; he is from all eternity one and the same, with nothing added, nothing taken away; no need of a counselor for him!
22 How beautiful are all his works, delightful to gaze upon and a joy to behold!

The older translation was made from the Vulgate (a Latin translation) while the newer translation was made from the original languages. In this instance the Vulgate seems to be something of a paraphrase, transposing ideas from v. 22 into v. 21 and vice-versa. We’ll discuss more about translations in my next article.

Chapter Break

Even once you have identified the right book, you’re still not home-free.

Let’s say you want to look up the verse “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet” and the citation is Mal 3:23. You know that “Mal” is an abbreviation for the book of Malachi in the OT, but when you turn to chapter 3 in that book, you see that it ends at v. 18. It turns out that the verse cited is actually v. 5 of chapter 4 of Malachi in your bible. Is the citation wrong?

First you need to understand that the original scripture writings were not divided by chapter and verse. Those were medieval Christian inventions (chapter divisions were introduced in the 13th century and verses date from the 16th century) to make it easier to find a specific passage in the Bible. Jews later adopted the system for the same purpose, but it wasn’t 100% the same. That’s why there are four chapters of Malachi in the bibles that follow the English numeration and three chapters in the Hebrew Bible (and translations that follow the Hebrew numeration). A bible with good annotations will point this out (that is, it will provide a note at Mal 4:1 that says something like “Ch 4:1-6 are Ch 3:19-24 in Hebrew”).

Many times the chapter breaks seem rather arbitrary. For example, Gen 1 gives the story of the six days of creation, but the seventh day is covered at the beginning of Gen 2. A modern reader would expect that the first three verses (it is debatable whether Gen 2:4a belongs with the first creation story or the second) of Gen 2 should have been included in Gen 1 to complete the story.

Second Verse, Same as the First

The English translations most used by Protestant denominations (KJV, NRSV, NIV, etc.) follow the English numeration. Catholic (NABRE, NJB) and Jewish (NJPS) translations follow the Hebrew numeration. You can see how this could lead to confusion.

Let’s say a Catholic author wants to cite “Create in me a clean heart, O God” in Ps 51 and references Ps 51:12. A Protestant reader looks up the verse in their bible, only to find “Restore to me the gladness of your salvation.” The Protestant may then suspect that Catholics are using a different Bible.

Indeed, the most likely place you can expect to find a discrepancy in scripture citation between English versions (EV) and Hebrew-numeration is in the Psalms. In the English versions, titles like “To the leader. A psalm of David” are not given a verse number, but they are in the Hebrew Bible. As many of the psalms have such a title line, the verse enumeration in EV bibles will frequently be off by one or two from the Hebrew enumeration. A biblical scholar would cite the passage above as Ps 51:12 [51:10 EV] so you could easily find the passage no matter which translation you are using.

An author unaware of the versification differences will only quote the English or Hebrew numeration, depending on which bible version that author happens to be using. Understanding alternate names for biblical books and chapter/verse numeration differences can help you find the right verse if the author happens to be using a different bible version from yours.

What is Gopher Wood?

In northern Kentucky, the Creation Museum is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark, based on the specifications provided in Genesis 6:14-16:

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and set the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. (RSV)

There’s not a whole lot of detail and it allows plenty of room for imagination. The Creation Museum ended up with a vaguely Egyptian-looking design. The Bible doesn’t define the length of a cubit but it is the length from the elbow to the tip of the fingers. If the standard measure is 18 inches, the dimensions of the ark would be 450 x 75 x 45 feet. The Creation Museum chose an Egyptian cubit of 20.4 inches, so that makes their Ark 510 feet long. By contrast, the Titanic was 850 feet long, but was made of steel. Noah’s Ark would have been bigger than any wooden ship that has ever been constructed.

“Entry of the Animals” to Noah’s Ark by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680)

As you can see, the biblical description leaves a lot of wriggle room. And the dimensions and the description of the door and three decks are the clearest parts. The rest of the passage uses some rare words (that I have emphasized in bold), the meanings of which are much debated.

The Hebrew word translated “ark” is tebah. It is used many times in Genesis 6-9, but outside of the flood narrative, it only occurs in Exodus 2:3, 5 to describe the basket in which baby Moses was placed. (The word translated “ark” in Ark of the Covenant is a completely different Hebrew word.) Tebah is a loan word from the Egyptian language to describe a box or chest. The Vulgate translates it as arca, from which we get the word “ark.” To be consistent, the word should be translated as “box” in both Genesis and Exodus. While tebah does not mean a ship, functionally it serves as a lifeboat in both cases.

Next up, the ark is to be constructed of “gopher wood.” What the heck is gopher wood? “Gopher” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word goper and no one knows for sure what it means, except that it has nothing to do with a burrowing rodent. Many English versions of the Bible (KJV, RSV, NJPS, NAB, NABRE) don’t try to translate it. A few others (NEB, NIV, NRSV) translate it as “cypress” wood, but that is just a guess. Hebrew does have a word for cypress, so if that’s what the Priestly writer wanted to say, he could have used that word.

The problem is that goper only appears here in the entire OT. Such a word is called a hapax legomenon (meaning “said once” in Greek). The most reliable way to translate a word is from its context, but how do you do that when you only have one context in which it occurs? Well, we can look to see how it was translated in ancient versions of the OT. The LXX translates it as “squared timber” and the Vg as “smoothed wood.” Both translations are describing not a particular type of wood, but wood prepared in some certain fashion. Because the LXX and Vg were closer to the time of the biblical writings, they may reflect a knowledge of the word no longer available to us or they may have simply guessed at the meaning of the word.

The Hebrew word translated “rooms” in many English versions (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NABRE, NJPS, NIV) is qinnim. This word is the plural of qen (“nest”) which elsewhere in the OT appears only in the singular. Since the original Hebrew only contained the consonants with the vowels added later, some scholars have proposed a different set of vowels that would yield the word qanim, “reeds” (NEB, NJB). This would yield a neat parallelism in the translation: “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, with reeds make the ark.” The implication being that the ark would be constructed of both wood and reeds, perhaps with the reeds helping to seal the gaps between the wooden beams. Reeds were also used in the construction of the boats in the other flood myths like Atrahasis and Gilgamesh, so its use here could reflect an influence from those tales.

The Hebrew word (koper) translated “pitch” only appears here in the OT. It is not a hapax legomenon in the strict sense because the word is used twice in the verse, as verb and noun: “and pitch it on inside and out with pitch.” Koper is only one letter different from the hapax goper, so there is a bit of wordplay here. Pitch, tar, or asphalt are petroleum-based products. This poses something of a problem for Young Earth Creationists because they insist that all petroleum products were formed during the Flood. So where did a pre-Flood Noah get his pitch?

V. 16 gives us another hapax in tzohar, which the Vg translates as fenestra (“window”). Modern translators turn to a similar Arabic word which means the back of a hand or a human back. The logical conclusion is that tzohar was used to refer to the top or roof of the ark. The next part of the verse (“and finish it to one cubit from above”) is somewhat incomprehensible, so it is not clear if a gap between the roof and the sides is being discussed or an overhang of the roof. 

What are we to make of all the rare words? One possible explanation is that those words were in the tradition that the Priestly writer received. Just like if we were retelling the nativity story, we might say something like “the infant Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid to rest in a manger.” “Swaddling clothes” and “manger” are not everyday words for most people but those words from the King James translation are such a part of the tradition that we would repeat them as-is. Something similar may be happening here with words like “gopher wood”.

Between the vague specifications and the rare words with contested or unknown meanings, we can only have a general idea of what Noah’s Ark was supposed to have looked like. But if you want to see the Creation Museum’s version, The Ark Encounter is scheduled for a grand opening in the summer of 2016.

An Inerrant Translation?

The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is, without a doubt, the most influential translation of the Bible in the English language. Commissioned by James I of England and completed in 1611, it became the standard for quoting scripture. Written in the language of Shakespeare, millions can quote passages of it from memory: “man shall not live by bread alone,” “for whither thou goest, I will go,” “the Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” and so on.

Since 1611, however, many discoveries either gave us older versions of the manuscripts that were then available to the KJV translators or shed light on the meanings behind the Hebrew and Greek words. Yet, the KJV had become so beloved over the centuries that release of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) in 1952 was greeted with accusations of blasphemy and book burning. It was only inevitable that, after having been used almost exclusively for almost 350 years, there would be a contingent of bible believers who conclude that the KVJ was the only English translations that Christians should read: “If it was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me.”

But it is one thing to prefer the KJV for the beauty of its language or its familiarity. It is quite another to fetishize it as a divinely inspired translation, based on specific Hebrew and Greek texts that are also divinely inspired. To be clear, many evangelicals believe the original Hebrew and Greek autographs – originals which everyone agrees are no longer in existence – are divinely inspired or inerrant (or both). But there is a certain cadre of fundamentalists who argue that the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Textus Receptus underlying the KJV are superior to the Hebrew and Greek texts today that have been reconstructed using older and better manuscripts.

If you turn to Gen 4:8 in the KJV, you will read: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” Now, let’s compare to the RSV: “Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”

Cain’s words “Let us go to the field” (only two words in Hebrew) do not appear in the KJV. In the RSV (and other modern translations that have the line), there is a textual note: “Sam Gk Syr Compare Vg: MT lacks Let us go out to the field”. This note is telling us that the Masoretic Text (MT), the authoritative Hebrew text for rabbinic Judaism, is missing Cain’s actual words, but we are able to fill in this gap by looking at other ancient texts such as the Samaritan Pentateuch (Sam), the Greek Septuagint (Gk, also abbreviated LXX), the Syriac Peshitta (Syr), and the Latin Vulgate (Vg). All of these texts were copied or translated from a Hebrew text much older than the oldest complete Hebrew text we possess today and serve as a check against the MT. 

The relationship between the various ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament, according to the Encyclopaedia Biblica

In the case of Gen 4:8, it turns out that the MT appears to have lost a couple of words and the ancient versions were able to supply them. And Gen 4:8 is not an isolated example. Despite the care of the scribes copying the texts, over the centuries mistakes were made. Sometimes the eye of the scribe would jump over a line and miss copying it.

When you have several ancient manuscripts that agree with each other against the MT, what most likely happened is that the words were originally there in the root Hebrew text. When the other versions branched off they copied or translated the words that were there. But in the branch that led to the MT the words accidentally dropped out at some point.

While logical, this is not an acceptable explanation for the KJV-only crowd. Their doctrinal belief is that the MT on which the KJV is based is without error because God would not inspire the human authors to write down his words, only then to allow those holy words to succumb to scribal copying errors. No, he would divinely preserve his words through the centuries. Any “gaps” in the MT are only apparent gaps. The other ancient versions independently (and erroneously) concluded there were words missing from Cain’s speech and just happened to supply the same words to plug the hole. The KJV translators were divinely inspired to perceive that, in fact, there were no missing words and thus translated the passage exactly how God intended.

It only makes sense if you are already predisposed to the conclusion.

I appreciate that ancient texts can correct mistakes that were made somewhere down the line when a copy of a copy of a copy was being copied. I welcome new discoveries of non-biblical texts that shed light on how biblical words should be translated. We should always be striving to improve our understanding, to make known that which was once hidden.

Or as the KJV itself put it in Luke 8:17, “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”