How We Got the Bible: How the Ancients Read it

After you've studied philosophy for a while, you begin to ask some pretty weird questions; some of which we take for granted.

No, I'm not talking about "Why is the sky blue?" (That's a question for science), I'm talking about "What proof do I have for my own existence?  How do I know that I'm not a brain in a jar given the illusion that I'm experiencing life? What proof do I have that good and evil exists, outside of relying on the opinions of others (argumentum ad populum), or myself (when I know I've been wrong from time to time?"

These are very good questions, which we'll look at later (I keep saying that, don't I?), but for right now I want to ask a question that (I think) most people wouldn't normally ask about the Bible: why does it have chapters and verses?

I think most people take for granted that the Bible has chapters and verses, like how we often take for granted the existence of good and evil.  The problem is that the ancient Israelites didn't (and some still don't) read the Torah (first five books of the OT) or Nevi'im (pretty much everything else from the OT) with chapters and verses; they read it from a VERY LARGE scroll.  That's the reason why in Luke 4:16-21 Jesus unrolled a scroll and had to find the place where the prophecy about him was written.  Let me illustrate how hard that would've been:

Have you ever gone to a webpage that was exceedingly long?  Like you just kept scrolling down and down and down, and it just kept going?  Imagine doing that sideways, and the length of the webpage is a little less than the size of the Old Testament.  Now imagine that this HUGE scroll had no chapters and verses as reference points. Yeah, it was hard, and at least Hebrew had spaces between words.  Ancient Greek was much harder to read.

This may seem strange, but have you ever wondered why we have punctuation marks, capital letters, or spaces between our words? If you're reading this, then you're most likely familiar with reading things based on the Latin alphabet, and haven't been exposed to writting systems that don't have capital letters or punctuation marks.  Chinese, Korean, and Japanese don't have capital letters, but they have adopted punctuation marks into their modern writing.  Ancient Greek didn't have spaces, punctuation marks, or lowercase letters.  Try reading this:

IDONOTUNDERSTANDWHATIDOFORWHATIWANTTODOIDONOTDOBUT
WHATIHATEIDOANDIFIDOWHATIDONOTWANTTODOIAGREETHATTHEL
AWISGOODASITISITISNOLONGERIMYSELFWHODOITBUTITISSINLIVING
INMEFORIKNOWTHATGOODITSELFDOESNOTDWELLINMETHATISINMY
SINFULNATUREFORIHAVETHEDESIRETODOWHATISGOODBUTICANNO
TCARRYITOUTFORIDONOTDOTHEGOODIWANTTODOBUTTHEEVILIDON
OTWANTTODOTHISIKEEPONDOINGNOWIFIDOWHATIDONOTWANTTOD
OITISNOLONGERIWHODOITBUTITISSINLIVINGINMETHATDOESIT

That was Romans 7:15-20, and the entire New Testament was written like that. 

Spaces, punctuation marks, and lowercase letters helps differentiate when there are pauses and breaks in thoughts, and help establish when new thoughts begin or end. Remember that illustration I made earlier about a really long webpage read sidways?  Now imagine doing that while reading the above text.  Kinda hard to find a passage of scripture right?

Well, the good news is that there were a couple people who knew this, and a little while after the Bible was translated into Latin (which added spaces between words), a French dude named Stephen Langton divided the Bible into chapters in 1227, and another dude named Robert Stephens went a step further and separated the Bible into verses in 1551. The modern Bible still reflects that reference system.

That's why in 1 Corinthians 6:16, Paul quotes only portion of Genesis 2:24 andleaves out the rest of verse 24. To Paul, he was quoting a portion of a book, much like how we would quote a portion from a modern novel.

A dude named Don Steward does a good job explaining the pitfalls and advantages of having this reference system, but for now, I think we've wrapped up this topic for this week.

Next Tuesday, I'll be talking about the origin of the King James Bible.  See you there. :)

Image source: http://www.torahscribe.com