Archive for March, 2006

On Friday we listed direct quotations of the Old Testament from the New Testament. We drew this data from the Classic Thinline edition of the ESV, which has footnotes pointing out such citations. (We found 263 direct quotations in the New Testament.)

Today we give a much more expansive view of Scripture’s interrelatedness, presenting data from the over 80,000 cross references found in the ESV Classic Reference edition. As with any hand-compiled cross reference system, the references to some extent reflect the biases of the compilers. There are undoubtedly more than 80,000 interrelations in the Bible. The Logos Bible Software blog suggests other ways to compile such a report based on the underlying text.

Between-Book Cross References

The following chart illustrates the number of cross references pointing to each book in the Bible, excluding same-book citations. As with the New Testament data we presented Friday, Psalms and Isaiah have the most cross references pointing to them.

Between-Chapter Cross References

The following chart illustrates the number of cross references pointing to each chapter in the Bible, excluding same-chapter citations. Deuteronomy 32 (Moses’ farewell song) leads the pack, followed by John 1 (“In the beginning was the Word…”), Psalm 78 (a brief history of Israel), and Luke 1 (before Jesus’ birth).

Find Your Own Patterns

Download an Excel spreadsheet (15 MB) containing the data behind the above charts (and a lot more). Do some number crunching yourself and post an entry on your blog if you find anything interesting.

We leave you with a giant table showing which books contain cross references to other books. For example, Genesis has 98 cross references pointing to Exodus, and Exodus has 80 cross references pointing to Genesis.

Update: Fixed link.

At the Logos Bible Software blog, they’ve been discussing power-law relationships of biblical citations. (In other words, the number of verse citations generally follows a smooth curve. See their post for more background.)

One of the commenters asked for data about how many citations of the Old Testament appear in the New Testament. Here it is:

New Testament Citations of Old Testament Books

In absolute terms, the New Testament writers cited Psalms and Isaiah most often.

New Testament Citations of Old Testament Books When Controlling for Book Length

The above chart promotes long books over short books. (The Psalms gets cited more often in part because it’s a much longer book.) The below chart shows the number of New Testament citations per verse in the Old Testament book, giving you a different picture. Proportionally, Malachi and Habakkuk are cited most often.

New Testament Citations of Old Testament Books Matrix

The below table shows how many times each New Testament book cites each Old Testament book. Books that aren’t listed don’t have any citations.

We’ve posted a complete list of radio stations on which you can hear our Bible for Life radio spots. You can also listen to all the spots from the linked page.

Doug at CoffeeSwirls takes our recent post about punctuation and runs with it:

Personally, I would love to have a Bible with only the books to separate the text as well. Especially for the writings of Paul! The translations really butcher his thoughts with the numbering, if you only read from one verse to another. The English translation shows Paul to be a man who wrote rather long sentences, and it is not uncommon for one string of thought to take up two verses and more.

I have had a thought concerning this: What if a respected translation such as the ESV were to put out a Bible with no change in words, but with the verses renumbered. Yes, it would take some getting used to. But I think it would pay off spiritually in the end….

A personal undertaking, or an open source project could be done, not unlike the NET Bible, but they want to be accepted by the community. The KJV doesn’t have the burden of copyright any longer, so that could be a place to start. But the time involved to produce a Bible that would likely not catch on beyond a small group of people who only use it for personal use may not pay off. It would, however, be a beneficial exercise for the individual and would enhance Bible memorization with a fuller sense of immediate context.

Doug, you’re right that no Bible publisher is likely to renumber the verses of the Bible; there’s too much extrabiblical material keyed off the current verse system. But there’s still room for innovation within the current verse framework.

The Dilemma in a Nutshell

Bible publishers face a dilemma when designing a Bible: verse numbers need enough prominence to help readers find a particular verse quickly, but the numbers need to fade into the background during extended reading.

Combining Verses

Some translations occasionally combine verses. Take the CEV: it doesn’t separate Jude 24 and 25 into separate verses. This passage in the CEV reads (we’ve indicated what is traditionally verse 25 in bold):

Offer praise to God our Savior because of our Lord Jesus Christ! Only God can keep you from falling and make you pure and joyful in his glorious presence. Before time began and now and forevermore, God is worthy of glory, honor, power, and authority. Amen.

In the ESV, this passage reads (again, verse 25 is in bold):

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

The CEV translators felt that rearranging parts of the verses made more sense for their audience, “grade schoolers, second language readers, and those who prefer the more contemporized form.” Read their explanation for more background.

Marginal Verse Numbers

Other publishers take this approach a step further. Some Bibles omit in-text verse numbers entirely in favor of marginal notes showing what verses each paragraph covers. With this approach, Philippians 4:4-9 (ESV) would look like:

4-7 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8-9 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Color

On the less-extreme end, Bible publishers can also print verse and chapter numbers in a lighter color (gray, for example), to help the eye skip over them. Some non-ESV editions take this approach.

Do It Yourself: An Experiment

Electronic Bibles don’t face the same limitations as printed Bibles. Don’t want to see verse numbers, section headings, or the words of Christ in red? Turn them off.

Indeed, as Doug hints, you can produce something to help you with your personal study: take Philippians 1 without paragraphs, verse numbers, headings, or footnotes (Word document). Now add paragraphs where you think they should go. (Don’t look at the paragraphs in an existing Bible.) Where does Paul begin a new thought? Where does he build on previous thoughts? An exercise like this one can increase your appreciation for a book’s structure and argument. Paragraphing this chapter might take about fifteen minutes to half an hour.

Now share your re-paragraphing. Leave a comment on this post and paste your re-paragraphed text into the comment. If we get enough responses, we’ll see if any patterns develop. There are no wrong answers, so don’t be shy.

Once you’ve commented, feel free to compare your re-paragraphing to the paragraphing approaches taken by the ESV (and by other translations). See if you can figure out why the translators chose to break paragraphs where they did.

It would be interesting to learn whether the paragraph breaks vary by translation—do people who re-paragraph the ESV tend to have more or fewer (or different) paragraphs than people who re-paragraph the CEV? For this exercise, however, we’d like to stick to the ESV.