Chapter and Verse
Most people know that the chapter and verse divisions of the Bible aren’t part of the original text. Many people may not know that the versification of all Bibles is not the same. For example, if you look up a psalm in the Septuagint, it might have a different number than it does in the English Bibles. It is a very complicated situation. Particularly if your Bibles are digital.
One of the things that is so great about Logos is that they are always improving their product. They recently took on the huge project of mapping all those chapter and verse disconnects in xml. If you are inclined to be interested by such things, you will want to read the story about it.
Logos Bible Software Blog: Books, Chapters and Verses, Oh My!
Early versions of Logos Bible Software tried to impose some order on this tangled mess of reference schemes. You can link your Hebrew Bible with an English translation and Malachi 3.19 in the Hebrew will sync with 4.1 in the English and so on, and these mundane transformations work rather well. But where book boundaries and names are radically different, or the material is massively rearranged, a preference for the English system was enforced or no versemap alignment rules were defined.
Until now.
We’ve just finished a massive data project that defines the various structures of the different Bibles in all their glorious, gory detail, and allows for effortless transformations from one versification system to another. As it stands now, the project consists of 56.6 megabytes of xml files that look a lot like the snip pasted above. The new Bible data type generated from this data will be available to you, our dear customers, in the next major version of the software, which means the next version will have a higher degree of precision when it comes to Bible navigation, comparing Bible versions and viewing them in parallel, and Bible reference tagging.
So, one more reason to look forward to the next version. If you haven’t tried Logos, why not try a small package of books and see how good it is? I’d bet you’ll soon be hooked. (Not a paid commercial announcement — just a very satisfied customer who has been using this software for a very long time and has seen its whole evolution.)
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