[sword-devel] Versification

Chris Little chrislit at crosswire.org
Mon Jan 28 05:42:59 MST 2008



Barry Drake wrote:
> Hi Peter .........
> 
> peter wrote:
>> BTW how many variants are there?
> 
> Chris is the expert on this.  As I understand it, the two main schemes 
> in use are the LXX versification and the kjv with and without apocrypha. 
>   The only other significant one is the Coptic scheme.  However there 
> are a number of minor variations out there as far as I know.  Chris will 
> no doubt tell me where I have misunderstood this :-)
> 
> Catholic bibles follow LXX and protestant bibles follow kjv ....  at 
> least that's how it is with the bibles on my shelves.

There are about 6 major versification schemes and virtually innumerable 
variants. The major ones that I can think of are the Hebrew, Greek, 
Latin, English, & French traditions. In practice, Bibles differ from 
these models & combine portions of different models. Some Bibles have 
numerically out-of-order verses. And some have multiple instances of 
particular verse numbers.

Practically speaking, no amount of hacking canon.h will be capable of 
correctly accommodating the gamut of versification systems in use.

--Chris



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