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Verse divisions in the Hebrew bible
Abstract
La division de la Bible hebraique en vers est une tradition juive ancienne qui est refletee par le systeme d'accentuation, lequel marque la fin de chaque vers en placant l'accent «silluq» sous le dernier mot de chaque vers. Comme les massoretes ne notaient pas le nombre de chaque vers separement, les premieres bibles imprimees, en latin comme en hebreu, n'ont pas note les nombres correspondant aux vers. L'article examine la division des vers dans ces differentes bibles, latines, hebraiques ou rabbiniques, du XVe au XVIIIe siecles, puis dans les editions bibliques contemporaines.
The argument draws upon literary theory to revisit the two clauses that, traditionally, make up Song 1:1. (1) The title evaluates the work as the song-most of songs. I argue that the evaluation refers to the work’s manifold form of simulation—a literary work representing the speech of a dreamer, who speaks from both inside and outside the dream. (2) The scoring in MT , the rubric in LXX (Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus), ancient interpreters and modern all take the first words of the Song of Songs to be a heading, comprising title ( שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים ) and attribution ( אֲשֶׁר לִשְׁלֹמֹה ). I argue that the clause marked and understood as an attribution may be the beginning of the character’s speech.
Scholars have struggled to reach consensus about the literary relationship between the anti-Elide material in 1 Sam 2–3 and the so-called “Ark Narrative” in 1 Sam 4–6. I propose a new resolution to this problem. I argue that the two named characters, Hophni and Phinehas, have been introduced secondarily to and independently from the unnamed “sons of Eli” and represent a redactional layer that runs through chs. 1–2, and 4. Before the addition of these characters, the “sons of Eli” designated a generic priesthood associated with the character, Eli. The material about this priesthood is comprised of discrete passages that have been appended to Samuel’s birth story and its extension. The anti-Elide material was later connected to 1 Sam 4 through the addition of Hophni and Phinehas, who serve to recast the Elides’ iniquities as the reason for the Israelite defeat and loss of the ark.
This volume charts the Bible's progress from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. During this period, for the first time since antiquity, the Latin Church focused on recovering and reestablishing the text of Scripture in its original languages. It considered the theological challenges of treating Scripture as another ancient text edited with the tools of philology. This crucial period also saw the creation of many definitive translations of the Bible into modern European vernaculars. Although previous translations exist, these early modern translators, often under the influence of the Protestant Reformation, distinguished themselves in their efforts to communicate the nuances of the original texts and to address contemporary doctrinal controversies. In the Renaissance's rich explosion of ideas, Scripture played a ubiquitous role, influencing culture through its presence in philosophy, literature, and the arts. This history examines the Bible's impact in Europe and its increasing prominence around the globe. Combines biblical scholarship with cultural history. Features a broadly based team of international scholars. Integrates Eastern and global Christianity into the story of the Bible.
This volume examines the development and use of the Bible from late Antiquity to the Reformation, tracing both its geographical and its intellectual journeys from its homelands throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean and into northern Europe. Richard Marsden and Ann Matter's volume provides a balanced treatment of eastern and western biblical traditions, highlighting processes of transmission and modes of exegesis among Roman and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims and illuminating the role of the Bible in medieval inter-religious dialogue. Translations into Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian and Georgian vernaculars, as well as Romance and Germanic, are treated in detail, along with the theme of allegorized spirituality and established forms of glossing. The chapters take the study of Bible history beyond the cloisters of medieval monasteries and ecclesiastical schools to consider the influence of biblical texts on vernacular poetry, prose, drama, law and the visual arts of East and West.
Collaboration within digital humanities is both a pertinent and a pressing topic as the traditional mode of the humanist, working alone in his or her study, is supplemented by explicitly co-operative, interdependent and collaborative research. This is particularly true where computational methods are employed in large-scale digital humanities projects. This book, which celebrates the contributions of Harold Short to this field, presents fourteen essays by leading authors in the digital humanities. It addresses several issues of collaboration, from the multiple perspectives of institutions, projects and individual researchers. © Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty 2012. All rights reserved.
This volume examines the development and use of the Bible from late Antiquity to the Reformation, tracing both its geographical and its intellectual journeys from its homelands throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean and into northern Europe. Richard Marsden and Ann Matter's volume provides a balanced treatment of eastern and western biblical traditions, highlighting processes of transmission and modes of exegesis among Roman and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims and illuminating the role of the Bible in medieval inter-religious dialogue. Translations into Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian and Georgian vernaculars, as well as Romance and Germanic, are treated in detail, along with the theme of allegorized spirituality and established forms of glossing. The chapters take the study of Bible history beyond the cloisters of medieval monasteries and ecclesiastical schools to consider the influence of biblical texts on vernacular poetry, prose, drama, law and the visual arts of East and West.
The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology-and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews-certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books. Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in Christian-owned print shops, with Jews and Christians collaborating on the editorial and technical processes of book production. As this Jewish-Christian collaboration often took place under conditions of control by Christians (for example, the involvement of Christian typesetters and printers, expurgation and censorship of Hebrew texts, and state control of Hebrew printing), its study opens up an important set of questions about the role that Christians played in shaping Jewish culture. Presenting new research by an international group of scholars, this book represents a step toward a fuller understanding of Jewish book history. Individual essays focus on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences. Topics include the activities of scribes and printers, the creation of new types of literature and the transformation of canonical works in the era of print, the external and internal censorship of Hebrew books, and the reading interests of Jews. An introduction summarizes the state of scholarship in the field and offers an overview of the transition from manuscript to print in this period. Copyright
In Old Testament books, the places where traditionally a new chapter is made to begin are not always in line with the places where the biblical text divides itself into segments according to the structural coherence and syntactic discontinuities in the text itself. Some individual verses appear to be in the ‘wrong’ chapter. Starting with less controversial examples and moving on to more controversial ones, it is argued that translators (and readers) can and should be guided from the start by the segmentation on the basis of structural and syntactic discontinuities in the text itself, rather than being influenced by the tradtional chapter division. For each verse that is discussed, recommendations are given about its position in the segmentation of the text. Comparisons are made with the segmentation of the text according to the Codex Leningradensis, Codex Aleppo and Codex Cairensis, as well as the Rabbinic Bibles of 1525 and 1548 and a number of exegetical commentaries. The article closes with some implications for the practice of Bible translation. Even without altering the traditional chapter numbering as such, it is still recommended to show the segmentation in the text itself with the help of paragraph divisions, blank lines and section titles in what the translation team considers to be the right places in the text.
The foundation of the International Organization of Masoretic Studies (IOMS) in 1972 was a turning point in the studies on Masorah. Since then, Masoretic studies have undergone a true renaissance. The publications on Masoretic issues have proliferated, and the importance of the Masorah for the study of the text of the Hebrew Bible has been stressed in numerous reviews. This brief survey presents the evolution of Masoretic studies, the main research lines and achievements, and some of the most relevant works in the last forty years.
The first Hebrew concordance, known as Meʾir Nativ, was written in the city of Arles, in Provence, between 1437 and 1447. Its author, Isaac Nathan, a prominent leader of Provençal Jewry, devoted immense efforts—money, time and thought—to the project. A critical examination of Nathan's preface to the concordance reveals that he had two main goals in creating this important tool: facilitating religious polemics with Christians and encouraging Bible study in Jewish society. Here these two phenomena are analyzed in their historical and geographical context.
Because of the concordance's polemical purpose, Nathan adopted the Christian division of the Bible into books and chapters. His decision afforded the Christian system a certain legitimacy that contributed to its adoption (through the publication of Miqraʾot Gedolot) in Hebrew Bibles published to this day.
Isaac Nathan was probably the first Jewish scholar to give serious consideration to Christian interpretations of Scripture and to include those he found compelling in his Hebrew work. The preface to Meʾir Nativ is heavily influenced by the Scholastics, particularly Thomas Aquinas. In his adoption of the scholastic approach Nathan resembled other fifteenth-century Jewish thinkers, especially in Catalonia and Aragon.
Book description: Stemmatology is the discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts. The object of this volume is the evaluation of the most recent methods and techniques in the field of stemmatology, as well as the development of new ones. The book is largely interdisciplinary in character: it contains contributions from scholars from classical, historical, biblical, medieval and modern language studies, as well as from mathematical and computer scientists and biologists. The contributions in the book have been divided into two sections. The first section deals with various stemmatological methods and techniques. The second section focuses more specifically on the various problems concerning textual variation.
An earlier volume on Studies in Stemmatology was published in 1996 and opened the most actual state of the art in stemmatology to a broad audience. That first volume was very well received by stemmatologists and also gave an impulse to new research, as several articles in the current volume clearly illustrate.
Both volumes are of interest to scholars in (historical) linguistics, literary studies, Bible studies, classical studies, medieval studies, and history.