History of the editions

An edition of the Bible is a particular thing: a text somebody translated, in a particular year, out of a particular source, and printed in a form that can be looked up. It is not “the Bible” in the abstract. Two Catholic editions a century apart can disagree about the number of a psalm, about where a chapter ends, and about which English word is made to carry a Latin verb.

The collection holds two kinds of text. There are translations — into English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch — and there are the texts they were translated from: the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New, the Greek Septuagint. The Latin Vulgate sits in both camps: a translation itself, and the thing several of these translations were made out of. Keeping both kinds in one comparison is what makes a translator’s decision visible. The word a translator started from and the word they arrived at can sit side by side.

The disagreement that shows up first is psalm numbering. Where the Hebrew counts two psalms, 9 and 10, the Septuagint and the Vulgate count one, and almost every psalm after it carries a number one lower. Almost, because three more joins and splits follow, and by the last three psalms, 148 to 150, the two counts agree again. The shepherd psalm is 23 in some of the editions here and 22 in others. The comparison settles that by passage rather than by the printed number, so a single request returns the same psalm in every edition, whatever each one calls it.

Click an edition below to learn its history and the details of its text.