The Twelve Tribes of Israel (Give or Take)

Joseph and Benjamin were the sons of Rachel. Those were the two sons of Rachel. You do have a sense that— I imagine that the other 10 sons of Jacob are like, “Why do you love Joseph and Benjamin more than you love us?” Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. Uh, having a nice time and, uh, ready to talk about some interesting stuff, uh, including but not limited to, uh, our first topic for today, which is going to be a What’s That? And the that— maybe it’s What Are Those? Because, uh, because we’re going to be talking about the 12 tribes of Israel. Or is it 13? Or is it 14? I don’t know. We’ll get to that. And then in the, in the latter half of our show today, we’re going to talk— it’s a History’s Mysteries. We’re going to talk about why everybody can— why we can say open up your Bible to this chapter, that verse, that, and, and everyone will kind of, kind of be on the same page, probably. Yeah, for the most part. We’ll figure out the versification and why it’s there and how it got there and all that sort of stuff in the latter half of the show.

But for now, let’s dive into— what’s that? So, 12 tribes of Israel, what’s that? Uh, let’s start with its— first of all, Israel is Jacob.

Ostensibly.

Ostensibly.

That’s the claim. Okay. That the patriarch named Jacob, so we have Abraham, Isaac, and then Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, had his name changed to Israel after his little wrestling match with somebody, a dude. Perhaps an angel, perhaps God.

Okay.

Somebody.

But it is God, right? Like, we’ve already done this.

It’s God. Yeah, yeah, it’s God. And God says, “You know what? I like the cut of your jib. So I’m going to change your name to Israel.” The idea being that Jacob struggled, fought, wrestled, wrassled even, with God. And Israel, the idea is supposed to be that it means he who strives with God or something like that. The reality is that’s not what the name Israel means. It probably means something more like El contends or God contends.

Okay.

But that is neither here nor is it there, because yes, so the name is changed to Israel and then Jacob has a bunch of kids, 12 sons, and those 12 sons are the eponymous ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. So basically, everything fits into a nice little genealogical line. So everybody can— Okay, great!

Then we’ve solved it! Episode over!

Bye! What is it I’m supposed to say at the end of the episode? I don’t even remember what I say now. I think I just say, “Bye, everybody.” Anyway, yeah, it would be twerrific if it were that simple. But we’ve got a bunch of problems with that. But yeah, part of the point here is that the 12 tribes are kind of a rhetorical organization principle, a way to curate and negotiate who belongs, who is part of our group. And if you can identify the tribe you’re a part of, that goes back to one of the 12 sons of Israel, that goes back to Israel, that goes back to Isaac, that goes back to Abraham. We’re all offspring of Abraham in that sense, or at least anybody who identifies with one of the 12 tribes of Israel. As Latter-day Saints who have a patriarchal blessing are identified, grafted in, so to speak, to one of the 12 tribes of Israel.

And it’s an identity marker. It’s a way to say you’re part of the in-group. But it is different from place to place in the Bible. And one of the things is that, is Levi in or is Levi out? Right. Not always listed.

Not always listed. There becomes a problem. So as I understand it, in Genesis, I think 35, it lists out the sons of Jacob as being, and I’m just going to list them, and I think these are right, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, tribe of Dan. By the way, I am just going to say this. I contact— I got our, our, our guy Sam, our, our right-hand man Sam, and I said, hey, can you have t-shirts up on our website with Tribe of Dan merch? Can you have Tribe of Dan merch done by the time this episode airs? Hopefully it has happened. So if you guys are interested, because, because we’re Dans, see, so it’s a Tribe of Dan sort of thing. Anyway, uh, if, if you’re interested, go check out, uh, dataoverdogmapod.com and there may be Tribe of Dan merch that you could get right now.

Hopefully there will be.

Hopefully.

It’ll be very embarrassing if there’s not.

Oh, we have suffered so much worse embarrassment than that.

Yes. This is not the greatest indignity that we’ve ever had to suffer.

But hopefully that’s all there and ready to go. Anyway, so there’s Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar. Issachar? I don’t know. How do you say that?

Usually English speakers say Issachar. Issachar.

Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.

Yes.

Uh, okay, so, okay, there you go. Now you said, is Levi part of it? And, uh, and that is a big question. And I think that that question somehow involves the other question, which is, where are Ephraim and Manasseh?

Yes, yes.

So, so talk to me about the two that ain’t there and the one that is that might not be?

Well, yeah, when we look at— because there’s, there’s another part where we have the land divided up among the 12 tribes, right? Uh, the land of Israel. And when you look at that division, there’s no Levi, but you do have— and there’s no Joseph because you have Ephraim and Manasseh. So those are the two children of Joseph. So you’ll notice there’s, there’s a nice little hydraulic thing here where if you omit Levi, you replace Joseph with Ephraim and Manasseh so that the number stays at 12.

Yeah.

So, which suggests that the number 12 is what’s important here. The names—.

Right.

The names aren’t that important. What’s important is that we got 12. And we can even go back a little further and talk about a time when it seemed like there were only 10 tribes. Oh! And the names— some of the names are different.

Uh-oh.

Because when we go back to the Song of Deborah, this is Judges 5. Judges 4 tells the story of Deborah, the fight with Sisera, and then chapter 5 is the Song of Deborah, which is where Deborah sings about this battle. And we rattle off the tribes of Israel, and Deborah kind of talks about whether or not they helped out. And curses some of the tribes that do not help out. But in fact, I bet if you’ll gimme just one second, I can pull up Judges 5. We’ll start in verse 14. Yeah, this is like 6 verses. “From Ephraim, they set out into the valley, following you, Benjamin, with your kin. From Machir marched down the commanders, and from Zebulun, those who bear the marshal’s staff. The chiefs of Issachar came with Deborah, and Issachar faithful to Barak. Into the valley they rushed out at his heels. Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart.”

Why did you tarry among the sheepfolds to hear the piping for the flocks? Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan, and Dan, why did he abide with the ships? Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, setting down—settling down by his landings. Zebulun is a people that scorned death. Naphtali too, on the heights of the field. We’ve got 10 tribes there and they don’t all line up. We are missing Judah and Simeon. They’re not there at all.

Judah seems like an important one. We’ll get to that, but— Yeah.

Levi, is also absent. Yeah. And then we don’t have Manasseh. We have Machir, who is elsewhere the leading clan or a descendant of Manasseh. Okay. And so some scholars suggest that maybe initially Machir was this tribe, but then later on they were like, we like Manasseh better, and they replaced it. And then you have Gilead. Which is a regional designation east of the Jordan. And a lot of scholars think maybe that’s supposed to be the tribe of Gad, because Gad is over east of the Jordan. So we got 10 tribes. Some scholars think that if this is like a social memory from, from hoary antiquity before we have the settled firm 12 tribes of Israel, maybe this is what ancient Israel looked like. And there’s a theory that Israel developed not from the descendants of one man, but from a confederation of unrelated tribes.

In other words, the tribes that occupied the central and the northern hill country, maybe when there was outside pressure, such as when the Philistines show up and are, you know, swinging their weight around, maybe they had kind of a seasonal amphictyony or confederation, and they confederated under the name Israel, El contends, because the high god El would fight on their behalf against their enemies. And then, you know, when the threat was gone, they all went their separate ways. Maybe that’s what happened. There are theories about that being the case.

“We got to reduce this. Let’s go with this guy Joseph. I got a cool story about the sheaves and selling him into slavery or something.” So we’re not sure exactly how all this shakes out because Levi doesn’t really become— you know, we have this tradition that, oh, they have these sanctuary cities and they get cities kind of scattered around and they don’t have any land, so they’re the priests and everybody brings stuff and that’s how they get their produce and their food and stuff like that because they don’t have their own land to grow and to raise it. That could be a secondary rationalization. That could just be them going, “We gotta find a place for Levi. No, no place for Levi. Well, let’s just say he was the priestly class.” It’s not until the post-exilic period, and particularly the books of Chronicles, that Levi really becomes the big deal, priestly speaking.

Well, since you’re talking about sort of the chronology of all of this, I am like, I get that this is likely to be an etiology to explain something, whatever it is they felt needed to be explained. Like you say, these diverse tribes that are all, you know, that all feel connected in some way. And so, so likely, uh, they, they found a re— a way of explaining that, that, that then connects them in a way that they feel we’re now familially connected, not just connected by proximity or whatever. But when was the— because we get Israel/Jacob out of Genesis. Right. When was that written versus when do we think this tribe, this tribal sort of connection formed?

Like, do we have a sense of any of that?

We— that’s complex. Okay. We think that some of these tribes are— some of them are identified very early and are significant. The 12 tribes as we know them now is probably something that firmed up probably in the exilic or post-exilic period. There are a couple of books that I want to recommend that go into great detail. One is The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism by Jason Staples, and the subtitle is A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity. And then the other is The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities Across Time and Space by Andrew Tobolowsky. So, um, those are two really good books that are going to discuss in great detail how we think this all came about. But when we look at pre-exilic Israel, there’s not a united 12 tribes of Israel.

Israel is the name for the Northern Kingdom. Right. Judah is the name for the Southern Kingdom, which is primarily Judah and Benjamin. And then the other 10 tribes are the name for the Northern Kingdom, at least as they are remembered in the literature that was curated by Judah. Right. And there’s what seems like happened, if you go by the narrative that we find in the text, is that there was a united kingdom, it fractured immediately, and then the two groups were always fighting. And then the Northern Kingdom was exiled 722 BCE, and then the Southern Kingdom kind of took over their identity as the nation of Israel. The reality is, is a lot different from that. Most likely there was never a united kingdom, or if there was a united kingdom, it was not all of these 12 tribes. It might have been a small little group that occupied, uh, you know, part of the central hill country or something like that.

But I tend to think that there was no united kingdom of Israel, and the notion of a united kingdom is something that was imagined centuries later, right? That, that Judahite, um, and, and later probably Deuteronomistic and other authors are creating this background for themselves as a way to try to gin up a shared identity and as a way to assert authority. Um, and because the people who, uh, the lost 10 tribes of Israel, these were the ones who were taken away to Assyria, scattered across the Assyrian Empire, and just ceased to exist. And we have no record of them after that. And whether they existed at all is— whether they existed as a specific set of 10 tribes under Israel is pretty doubtful. But that’s a handy memory if you are a Judahite and you are a Judahite scribe who’s writing all of this down, because you think that both groups worship the same deity and so have to be part of the same group.

But then you get the Babylonian exile, 587 BCE, and now it’s the Judahites and the Benjamites who are taken away to Babylon, and they managed to preserve their identity. But there are a bunch of others who are left behind in the land who are Israelites. And according to the narrative in 2 Kings, these are the—they kind of apostatized. And this is where I mentioned in our after-party that lions were sent in. That’s part of the legend there were lions sent in, and then the Assyrians sent priests to go minister to the tribes that were left behind. And these are supposed to be the ancestors of the Samaritans. And this is a way to make sense of how the Samaritans could be related to us, but we don’t like them. Right. Because they were—anybody who’s anybody got exiled, and everybody who left behind, they no longer count.

Even if they were direct descendants from, you know, ostensibly one of the tribes of the original 12 tribes of Israel, which indicates that membership is more ideological at this point. It’s not so much about genealogy as it is about ideology. Do you follow our way of doing things, or are you one of the dirty Samaritans who got left behind and were corrupted by Assyrian priests? Or Babylonian priests rather. And you know, you’ve got members of the diaspora. There are Jewish folks, if we want to call them Jewish, who occupy Elephantine on the Nile. They built a temple there. They were around 400 BCE, they were in contact with Jerusalem and the leaders in Jerusalem and were authorized to rebuild their temple. So it just gets messy the further back you go in time. It’s really the Second Temple period when you are putting together kind of Israel’s scriptural heritage and their background and their stories that you, you have an attempt to firm up this identity as descendants from one man, Israel/Jacob, and through one of his 12 sons or 11 sons and 2 grandsons, right?

Uh, or maybe these other 10 people, 2 of whom are using, um, you know, pseudonyms. Um, gotta use a nom de plume, as the, as the great poet once said. Um, so, so it really is a, a myth in the sense of a, a, a story that you tell to as an ideology and as a way to assert beginnings and belonging and identities and boundaries and things like that. So there likely, in the pre-exilic period, there likely weren’t 12 tribes of Israel, and if there were, they certainly don’t match up perfectly with what we now identify as the 12 tribes of Israel.

Yeah, it was interesting. I, I think this conversation, uh, came up because a couple weeks ago we talked about the number 12. We somehow, we were talking about the 12 tribes, I think, or something, and, and the number 12 came up. And you mentioned how, you know, that—I think you called it a hydraulic pump, that if it—if one goes out, somebody else has—somehow you gotta, you gotta balance it out and make it 12. Yeah. And I, it’s funny, because I associated—I know that in, like, for instance, in Revelation, it talks about the 12—is it doors or 12? 12 Gates into New Jerusalem or whatever. And I assumed that that was a reference to the 12 tribes of Israel. But maybe the number 12 kind of predates this 12 tribes idea as a—and because it seems so important for them to keep the, the number 12 around, uh, so do you think that that number 12, they just decided on the significance of that number before, uh, before they were working with these tribes and, and so they just had to match the 12?

If Judges 5 is any indication, no. We already had some sense of tribal affiliation, maybe not direct descent from a single individual, but at least some kind of affiliation because Deborah is mustering the tribes. Some of them show up, some of them don’t. Some of them are leaving.

But that’s the one that you said there were 10. Right. Okay, I see what you mean. Yeah, so that’s before—I get it, I get it. Yeah, yeah. —Indicating that 12 is not as important as just tribes.

Yeah, at some point the number 12 became solidified, and that had to be—and so you probably have some of these tribes, a handful of them, at some point the number 12 becomes important, and then you get to the point where it’s like, we’re either including Levi and excluding Joseph’s offspring, or we’re excluding Levi, we’re including Joseph’s offspring, to the exclusion of Joseph as well. And that becomes then the, you know, the 12 disciples. And then you have to have one, you know, one of them went off and either hung himself or tripped and fell and exploded. Or, you know, if it’s not—oh gosh, no, I can’t. If Papias has anything to say about it, he just swelled up as wide as a road and popped. And yeah, so you had to replace him, and then you have Matthias as the one who gets elected by the roll of the knucklebones or whatever.

So that’s not—.

It is funny to have a one-out, one-in policy when it comes to disciples.

But you can see how they could be like, okay, so we don’t have Levi. Do we add one? Yeah. How are we going to do that? No, we gotta, we gotta go down to grandchildren, and that means we then replace the child with the two grandchildren. And you can see people, you can imagine some of the people like, uh, I don’t know if anybody’s really gonna buy that.

Why are we doing this again?

Yeah. But, um, but yeah, I’m sure there’s—that kind of seems like the logical order of events based on our ability to try to kind of reconstruct an order to when these texts were written, which texts are earlier, a rough kind of relational chronology. But which could change. We could find a potsherd or a scroll. Yeah. Or an inscription or something that could change a lot of this. But based on the available data, it certainly seems like the 12 tribes is an artificial construct intended to facilitate the curation of a sense of identity and the boundaries of that identity, because it shifts as, oh, we don’t want to include the Samaritans. So if they do want to be a part of us, ‘Even though they already have the genealogical, you know, man, I just can’t think of words, bona fides or whatever, credentials, even though they have the genealogical credentials, they don’t get to count as the House of Israel unless they accept a bunch of stuff that we say they’re supposed to accept.’ It’s a way to curate and to structure those boundaries and identities and thus power.

One thing that I just realized, uh, check me on this, um, Jacob, his— these sons are not all from the same wives. They are not. That’s interesting. Yes, because Jacob had two wives, Leah and, uh, Rachel. Rachel. Okay. And then also there’s like a whole servants and concubines thing, right?

Yes, because Leah and Rachel each gave their maidservant, their female enslaved person, their concubine, Bilhah and Zilpah to Jacob, just because, you know, that’s what you did, I guess. I mean, they’re your property. Yeah, they’re your property. You’re going to hand them over. And it sounds like one of them, Rachel, was just not conceiving. And so was like, try this piece of property here of mine. And so, and then Leah did the same with Zilpah. So yeah, I think we get 6 sons through Leah. That would be Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. Gad and Asher come through Zilpah. Okay. Joseph and Benjamin come through Rachel, and then Dan and Naphtali come through Bilhah.

It’s interesting to me that they all seem to be— even though, like, it, it, it feels like when I’ve read, you know, stories of begatting, it seems like, you know, certain sons get prioritized and certain sons get deprioritized based on, you know, birth order. And, and also maybe to do with, uh, you know, whether you came from a wife or a maidservant sort of slave type of situation. But it seems like these are all honored, at least when we talk about the tribes of Israel, they’re all honored roughly the same. They’re all given the same amount of weight. Is that true, or was there ever a time when it was like, ah, your tribe was a Bilhah tribe, so?

I think if you look in Genesis 49, that’s where Jacob gives his blessings. And there is some, you do see some stratification there in who gets a good blessing and who doesn’t. But you also have stories like Joseph was Jacob’s favored son. And, uh, you know, he get— Joseph and Benjamin were the sons of Rachel. Those were the two sons of Rachel. And we have in the Joseph story, Benjamin is the youngest, and Joseph gets sold into slavery. Jacob thinks he’s dead. And then when the, the other sons go and try to buy food, and Joseph’s like, thieves! And, um, he says, you come back with your youngest son, or, you know, bad stuff’s going to happen to you. And then Jacob’s like, “No, no, I can’t let you take Benjamin.” So you do have a sense that— I imagine that the other 10 sons of Jacob are like, “Why do you love Joseph and Benjamin more than you love us?” But at the same time, Judah has got a place of prominence in the later telling of everything.

And Judah’s— that’s the territory that Jerusalem is in. And, you know, Judah is the Lion of Judah, and that’s, you know, where the Messiah is going to come through. And you have some— and, you know, Reuben is like, in the story, Reuben’s the one who’s like, “Wait a minute, what if we didn’t kill Joseph?” At least one part of the story. And then Judah shows up and is like, “Wait a minute, what if we didn’t kill Joseph?” But you’ve got folks like Dan and Naphtali, Bilhah’s sons who, you know, they don’t really have much of a role to play. The tribe of Dan pops up, but not in the most favorable way.

I mean, it’s pretty favorable in our merch section. What?

Golly. And then Levi gets to be the priesthood line, kinda. So, so I think some stand out and some are just We’re still here.

Also appearing. Yeah. Yeah. And featuring. Yeah. All right. Well, there you have it. That’s the absolutely clear and not at all confusing story of the 12 tribes of Israel, which, yeah, like so much of the Bible, we walk away feeling less edified than we walked into it. So why don’t we move on to History’s Mysteries? Okay, so versification, uh, it didn’t happen naturally, it didn’t happen originally, uh, so, so why do we all have chapters and verses and everything? When did that happen? Who did that happen? Why did that happen? How? All of the questions.

And the answer is Jesus. The answer is— Thanks for watching, everybody. Magic. No, it’s something that happened in, you could say, in fits and starts, kind of incrementally, because verses and chapters are obviously two different sizes of divisions. But there are attempts to try to divide up the text in some kind of way going back pretty far. Okay. So in the early medieval period, I think we start to see divisions into verses, kind of like paragraph-like units. You have the petuhah is an open section in Hebrew, and then the setumah is a closed section. And so we already see Masoretic manuscripts from the medieval period that are beginning to divide up things into sense units like this.

So, and we should mention that like, like what the original manuscripts would have looked like didn’t even have punctuation.

Oh yeah, no, the, um, no, I’m starting with the Hebrew Bible, but, but, um, to, to consider both of them briefly, yeah, they were written in scripta continua, which would be like there are no spaces between words. It’s just all written as a mass. And, you know, frequently a word starts on one line and finishes on the next line down. You can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can see an example of this. There are no vowels as we’re used to seeing them in printed Hebrew. And things were written kind of together. And this is particularly true of the Greek New Testament manuscripts as well, where it’s all just smushed together. And they didn’t even have accents or breathing marks for the first nine centuries of the New Testament.

And so when we— It’s so painful to imagine. It’s like, when I imagine text like that, I just, I, I can’t imagine how long it takes a scholar. I guess maybe you get used to it, but it’s— but like, just making sense of that. And also, obviously, so many opportunities for it to go wrong, for, for the sense that you’re making to be incorrect or whatever. And that’s before we even have punctuation, which helps it make sense, and before we have spaces and stuff. So, all right, sorry, sorry, I— my mind gets a little bit blown and then I, I have to like I have a bit of a— I go into a reverie. So let’s continue with what you were saying.

Yeah, so when we’re talking about the Hebrew Bible, we have these divisions into what would ultimately kind of become the verses of the Hebrew Bible. So versification in the Hebrew Bible predates versification in the New Testament.

And it was the Masoretes that did this?

We find it in Masoretic manuscripts. There are some indications when you look in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are some places where there are gaps that roughly correspond to some of the later divisions. You also had liturgical divisions within the Hebrew Bible where there was the Palestinian triennial cycle where they divided up the Torah into 154 sedarim, which meant the Torah could be read over the course of about three years. And then you have the Babylonian annual cycle where the Torah is divided into 54 parashot. And these divisions were kind of maintained. These are larger-scale divisions, not verse divisions. And by the time we get to the, like, the Leningrad Codex, which dates to around 1008 CE, we’ve got a pretty stable verse system.

Okay. Where there are— there’s a type of punctuation that is indicated in the text. And even before that punctuation that would mark the end of a verse, they use cantillation marks and certain kinds of accents to divide up things. And in the Hebrew Bible today, you will see that there are further divisions, like the verse itself can be divided further. They usually have a little mark that’s like a chevron or a caret that marks the accent for the main division of a verse into two different divisions. That’s called the atnah. And then you have other further divisions. So the Masoretes did all kinds of dividing up and counting and vocalization and all this kind of stuff.

And so in the 1200s, you have, uh, Stephen Langton, who divides up the Hebrew Bible into, uh, divisions using the, uh, into chapter divisions using the, uh, the Vulgate. So the Latin Bible is, is what he uses for this. And then, so now you have Jewish verse divisions and parashot and things like that. You have Christian chapter divisions in the Vulgate. And because Jewish and Christian scholars and people were communicating, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes not, there was some, uh, these chapter divisions bled into what was going on within Judaism. And so Judaism kind of adopts some of these chapter divisions because this became necessary as they were like, well, what passage are you talking about? And are the divisions—.

I assume that they’re meant to be sense units in some way. Like they’re meant to be divided up in a way that this part all seems to be of a piece, so I’ll just put that together. It’s not like every 200 words we just make a line and go. I assume that they’re trying—.

I think it was a bit of both because I think you have some sense units that were initially large enough that they would have felt a little awkward as one chapter. And so you do, I think there are some places where you have chapter divisions where you probably could have let it keep going. But at the same time, yeah, as they’re trying to divide up the chapters, they are looking for seams at which to place the chapters. So that was the work of that 13th century, uh, Christian who was doing that. And when we— when you compare the Christian Bible to the Jewish Bible, there’s— it is consistent most of the time, but there are a handful of places where the chapter divisions are different. Okay. And so they’re, uh, and it can be just one verse off, and particularly in the Psalms. And then there are other places where it’s like 10 verses off. So I would say 92% of the time they’re identical, but then that other 8-ish%, and I am just off the dome here, right?

The 8-ish% give or take 10%. Don’t hold it to everybody. Yeah. They’re off by 1 to a dozen, maybe 15 or 20. Verses for the— Wow. The largest discrepancies are maybe that large. I haven’t counted them up, so I don’t know, but there are some larger discrepancies.

So to be clear, what we’re saying is that the words are all the same, but where the numbers go is different. Yeah.

And you didn’t have verse numbers added until the 15th century. Oh, that’s interesting. So you just had divisions.

But you didn’t have numbers. What did those divisions look like if they weren’t numbered?

Well, like in the Hebrew Bible, you would have a special kind of like oversized colon that would indicate the end of the verse, or you would have a letter P to indicate a specific division of the verses. So, but they wouldn’t be numbered. So yeah, but the numbers were added around the 15th century, And that facilitated, you know, more precise referencing. And then, you know, as Jewish folks and Christian folks were debating with each other, it was easier to figure out exactly where your opponent was in the text. And then also this facilitated the public reading of the text, ‘cause you could get up and say, “I’m in this chapter, we’re gonna be talking about this verse.” And, you know, and then you could proceed to bore people to tears. Right. But yeah, so it’s, like I said, fits and starts. It’s incrementally, you’re getting smaller divisions and you’re getting larger divisions, and then you’re numbering the divisions.

And that’s how the Hebrew Bible got to be where it is more or less today.

And all of this happened before the printing press, is that right? Yep. Wow. That’s impressive.

This was stuff that was being done by hand. Oh man, the Masoretes are on another level. Oh yeah. When it comes to their transcriptions and their counting and their knowledge of the text and everything like that. Then when we get to the New Testament, you have, again, when you look at papyri and manuscripts of the New Testament, You have scriptio continua. Some of them are majuscule, where it’s all uppercase letters. Some of them are minuscule, where it’s all lowercase letters. Oh no! Where we don’t have the accents and the breathing marks and things like that. But you have around the 3rd century the Gospels being divided into numbered sections, and this was primarily to facilitate comparison. In kind of like harmonizing. Where’s this story in this other gospel?

And so gospel comparison and harmonization is kind of the foundation of these unit divisions for the New Testament. And then in the Byzantine period, so, you know, 4th, 5th century and on, you get chapter-like divisions. Kephalaia, which means headings, is one kind of division that kind of roughly corresponds to chapter. And then you have titloi, which would be the titles that would be added. And they differed from manuscript to manuscript, but some of them overlap more or less with later chapter divisions. But the system that Langton used to divide up the Hebrew Bible into chapters then is used to divide up the New Testament into chapters in those Latin Bibles. And then from the Latin Bibles, that makes its way back into Greek manuscripts.

And then the printed—by the time you get to the printed Greek New Testament, and this starts with Desiderius Erasmus in the early 16th century, he, um, and this is kind of funny, the—Desiderius Erasmus was really producing editions of the Latin Vulgate, and he heard that another guy out there was going to try to create a printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and his publisher was like, you could beat him, you could get it out first. And he was like, okay. And so he generated a dual column, Latin on one side, Greek on the other, uh, using the seven Greek New Testament manuscripts that were available to him at his library in Switzerland, and he managed to get it out the door before the other guy. And so his work became—

So now he’s famous and the other guy is just nobody.

Yeah, nobody. And so he created the first printed Greek New Testament, even though the last chapter of Revelation, he didn’t have a witness to it in the Greek New Testament manuscripts he had. So he took the Latin and translated it back into Greek and slapped it under that other column. But, uh, he created multiple editions of what he called his Novum Instrumentum, which would then later become called the Textus Receptus. And then other editors took up his work and continued that on. And then there was a guy named Stephanus, or Robert Estienne, um, and I’m sure the French speakers out there did not appreciate that, but in 1551, I think it was either his second or his third edition, he had begun editing editions of the Textus Receptus, but in 1551 he published his edition of the Greek New Testament where he divided up the Greek New Testament into verses.

So, versification for the Greek New Testament doesn’t happen until 1551, and then that was the—that became the source text, at least the versification source text for the very first printed Bible that had numbered verses in the New Testament. And that was the Geneva Bible, first published in 1560. Yeah, so when you have Tyndale, you have Coverdale, you have the Matthew Bible, you have the Great Bible, these are all without versification in the New Testament, and then the Geneva is the first to versify everything. Okay. So, and after the Geneva, you get the Bishops’ Bible, first published in 1568. And then the King James Version comes along in 1611, and it is a very conservative revision of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. So they’re all keeping it in the family.

Right. But yeah, the versification that we have now is based on that 1551 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus.

I think it’s so interesting because when we look at these scriptures, we were all raised with fully versified scriptures, and that’s how we think of it. And so when someone quotes a scripture and they just say it’s verse 12, and they just say verse 12, it can be very easy to think, okay, that’s what the author meant for us to take. You know, it makes sense that the author had this takeaway and it was verse 12. And it’s not. And you know, if you expand it into—if you look at it without the verses, just lifting something like verse 12 out is almost weird to do. Because, because it’s, it’s part of a whole paragraph or a whole sense unit. That’s—yeah. So it’s so normal in our eyes, in our lives to say, look at this verse, look at that verse.

Uh, you know, but I mean, we’ve talked about moments where that doesn’t make any sense, where somebody just made a choice. They cut off Genesis 1 in one place, and then there are four extra verses in Genesis 2 that very clearly belong to Genesis 1. And it doesn’t make sense to have them there, so we have to cut them off of the top of Genesis 2 for Genesis 2 to make sense as its own thing.

Yeah, well, and, and another famous example of this is Ephesians 5. Okay. Where we have in verse 21, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And then in most editions of the Bible, like the NET or the ESV, or even the NRSV-UE, there’s a section division separating verse 21 from verse 22. Okay. But verse 22 is part of the same sentence as verse 21. In fact, the verb is in verse 21. Verse 22 doesn’t have a verb. It is governed by the verb in verse 21. But you have— you will have an entire section division separating a single sentence.

Oh wow, a section division, not just a verse division. Wow. Yeah.

And there’s— there are a lot of people who have noticed this, that, that, you know, to divide it up into verses and the, the formatting is a big part of this. If you look in the King James Version, a standard King James Version, it’s just every verse is its own paragraph marked off by a number. And Latter-day Saints are probably the most blind to this because the LDS Church has always published a kind of traditional King James Version. And they have pilcrows in the King James Version, which is that kind of backwards-P-looking thing. And that’s supposed to indicate this is a paragraph division, right? But we just gloss right over it without thinking of it as, take a breath, we’re starting a new sense unit, right? Uh, and, and so that affects meaning. And so there’s a, there’s a really cool project. A guy named Adam Lewis Greene, um, published a, a, an edition of the Bible called Bibliotheca, and it gets rid of chapter numbers, it gets rid of verse numbers, it gets rid of section headings, it gets rid of study tools, gets rid of cross-references.

It’s just the text. And it is— it does introduce paragraphs in order to try to get some kind of sense units in there. But the idea is, let’s not have versification or chapter divisions govern how you’re going to consume the text, right? Because people will be like, I’m going to read so many verses, I’m going to read a chapter, right? And, and the idea here is, no, read until the sense unit concludes, and it’s a different experience of the text. And even in the King James Version, there’s extra punctuation— the commas, the semicolons, all that kind of stuff— is actually to facilitate something very specific, because when you have more punctuation, you have more pauses. And this is intended to facilitate the slower reading of the text in public so that your audience has time to digest every clause, every, um, every single division of the text.

So they, they really want you to divide it down to the, the clause level so that as you’re reading it, you pause, and that gives them a little more time to think about what you just said. You move on to the next clause, and there’s a— you know, maybe there’s a semicolon, pause, that gives them a little more time. So when it comes to the King James Version, at least, the punctuation, the formatting, the versification, everything is designed for a church setting, for the text to be read out loud in a church setting to an audience that is listening.

Well, that’s actually really interesting. As someone who’s studied Shakespeare, but from the perspective of an actor. So I, I’ve done quite a lot of Shakespearean performances, and I, you know, I studied how to perform Shakespeare. And one of the things that you have to sort of contend with is that, you know, you know, actors pay a lot of attention to, uh, to punctuation because it’s, you know, it’s a guidepost, like you say, for how, how, you know, where you’re going to pause, where you’re— how it’s going to to hit people’s ears, etc. But also, we know that the punctuation that, you know, that’s in one, you know, the Penguin version of Romeo and Juliet is going to be different from the one that’s in the Riverside Complete Works and whatever, because different editors have gone through, you know, because the First Folio was different, and the way that they punctuated back in the 1500s is very different from the way that we would punctuate something now, from the way that we would make sense of how punctuation is used.

So yeah, looking at the punctuation of something from the King James is going to be different than how we would punctuate something now. And that, yeah, that’s a— it’s just fascinating to me that we have so many of these, these layers of things, you know, that have been implemented to make more sense or to help us through this slog. It’s a lot. There’s a lot of text, yeah, in the Bible. And it’s not easy. But it— but also, like, even though it was meant to make sense and a lot of people put in a lot of work to help it, there are so many layers, starting with, starting with where we divide the words, and then inserting vowels, and then, yeah, like sentence breaks and paragraphs and quotation marks and, like, you know, commas and periods and all of that stuff.

And, uh, so yeah, there’s something fascinating to me about how all of these choices affect how we’re reading it and modify it from how we would have read it in ancient times.

Yeah, and if you ignore this - these are interpretive lenses. Right. These affect meaning, and they’re standing between you and the text. And there’s a whole pile of them. And when you ignore them and just imagine that you’re getting the unadulterated original text, you’re just letting those decisions determine what the text is able to mean for you. I think a lot more people need to be aware of the fact that even the way the text is punctuated is making decisions for you about what the text is going to mean. And I think the more people are aware of that, the more informed they can be about how they’re engaging with the text, if they are someone who is going to engage with the text as something authoritative, or at least meaningful and useful.

Yeah. Fascinating. So such cool stuff. Yeah. Well, there you go. If you think that you know somebody that might be interested in this, that might want to hear this, please feel free to send it to them. Please point them our way. We always appreciate that. If you would like to become a part of making this all happen, we’d love for you to go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can sign up to be one of our patrons, give us a little chunk of your change, and in exchange you’ll get, uh, you can get access to early and ad-free episodes. As well as, uh, the after party, which is bonus content that we do for you every single week. Um, so please look into that if that’s something that you are able to do. Uh, that we are always so grateful. And speaking of gratitude, we’re grateful to Roger for editing the show. And thanks so much to Sam for being our right-hand guy. And thanks to all y’all for tuning in.

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