So many verses. When will it get to the chorus?
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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They got rid of the chorus due to its Pagan Greek origins.
Amen!
The four Gospels :P
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.
As for when/why it started, this article from BibleOdyssey.org does a good job of explaining that in detail.
So, if I wanna start a 1 billion people religion, gotta write my shit like:
The Lost Apples
- And it came to pass that I went to the park with my apples, But I was so focused on TikTok that I did not heed where I placed them.
- And I wandered the park, watching video after video, And when I finally looked up, my apples were gone!
- I searched high and low, but they were nowhere to be found. I asked the squirrels and the birds, but they had not seen them either.
- And I was filled with great sorrow, for I had lost my apples. I sat down on a bench and began to weep.
- But then I remembered the words of the wise: "Do not despair, for all things are in the hands of the Lord."
- And I knew that my apples were safe, even if I could not find them. So I stood up and went on my way, trusting that the Lord would provide.
- And as I walked, I saw a little girl sitting on a swing. She was eating an apple, and it was the most delicious-looking apple I had ever seen.
- I approached the little girl and asked her where she had gotten the apple. She smiled and said, "A nice man gave it to me."
- And I knew that the Lord had provided. I thanked the little girl for the apple and took a bite.
- And it was the most delicious apple I had ever tasted.
If you ever want to steal candy from a baby, remember Lost Apples verses 7-9.
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
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.
Not just consistent page numbering, but the existence of pages at all—until about 300 CE, most books consisted of scrolls instead of bound codices.
pagination
i learned a new word today, thank you
It sure makes it easy for religious people to pick out tiny experts and use them out of context.
Excerpts*
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.
Much in the same way the Vedas were passed down
Hint: these turned into that (probably)
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.
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.
It’s to facilitate citing random verses out of context to support whatever you need it to.
Mnemonics for memorization and oral repetition. If that's not the origin, it certainly works that way.
For example, I can quote John 3:16, but if you asked me, "What was that thing god said about his son?"
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
Notice that we write laws and contracts in the same way. The bible was both. It was used to settle disagreements and to sentence people.
Guess what else is divided like that. That's right, it's the Quran. And maybe the Torah too, I don't know.
That's just a trope of religious texts.