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VULGATE VERSES 4000 Sayings from the Bible for Teachers and Students of Latin by Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. Published by Lulu Publishers 860 Aviation Parkway Morrisville, NC 27560 (919) 459-5858 www.lulu.com © 2007 Laura Gibbs. All rights reserved. This book is part of Bestiaria Latina, a collection of online and printed Latin language teaching materials. For more information, visit the website: www.bestlatin.net Post industriam sequitur sapientia. VULGATE VERSES This book and its companion website, BibliaVulgata.com, are designed to help you study Latin using the Vulgate Bible. Like my earlier book, Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs for Students of Latin (also available from Lulu Publishers), this book is organized according to grammatical categories. This method allows you to find easy-to-read Bible verses (or parts of verses) which are suited to your level of Latin, whether you are a beginning or an intermediate student. Beginning Latin students. If you are a beginning Latin student, do not try to work through this book from start to finish. Rather than follow this book’s order, you should follow the order in which the nouns and verbs are presented in your textbook, using the Table of Contents in this book to find the specific groups of verses that match the nouns and verbs you are studying. Intermediate Latin students. If you are an intermediate Latin student who already has completed a course in Latin, you can use this book as a systematic review of Latin grammar. You either can work through this book from start to finish, or you can focus on the specific categories of Latin nouns and verbs that you most want to practice. Latin Via Proverbs. An excellent way to use this book is in conjunction with the Latin proverbs and sayings collected in Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs for Students of Latin. These two books complement each other very nicely because of the types of grammatical constructions that are characteristic of proverbs, as opposed to the types of constructions most commonly found in the Biblical text. Latin Via Proverbs is especially strong on present tense verb forms, but weak on the perfect verb system. Vulgate Verses, on the other hand, is especially strong on the perfect verb system. By working with both books together, you can get a solid overview of the entire range of Latin verb forms. i Preface Learning Latin Through Bible Verses There are many reasons why reading these verses is an ideal way to practice your Latin. First and foremost: the verses are short! Take the first verse in the book, for example: Clara est sapientia, “Wisdom is splendid.” Just three little words! There are over one thousand verses in this book which are five words or fewer in length. So, even if you have to look up every word in a verse, that is still not very many words to look up. Another great advantage of Bible verses is that they mean something; in fact, they may be deeply meaningful for you, unlike the typical practice sentences you might find in your Latin textbook. This holds true both for persons who are believers in God and those people who are simply curious about the cultural traditions of Judaism and Christianity. If you are a believer, you will find many verses here which may be among your personal favorite verses, or verses whose imagery figures in your favorite hymns or prayers. If you are interested in the cultural history of the Bible, you will find in these verses the text of the Vulgate Latin Bible that inspired Saint Augustine and Saint Francis, Chaucer and Dante, Thomas More and Thomas Merton, to name only a few. Although I have entitled this book Vulgate Verses, many of the items you will find here are not complete verses, but partial verses. In fact, the verse divisions of the Bible are a comparatively modern invention. The “Geneva Bible,” published in 1560, was the first English Bible to use verse numbers. In this book, I have made use of the conventional verse numbering in order to help you locate the verses in the Bible, but I have also felt free to use partial verses whenever that suited the pedagogical purposes of this book. You will also find verses used more than once, with increasingly more complete forms of the verse found as the book progresses. Most of the items are stand-alone phrases whose meaning is clear, independent of context. For example, the phrase Omnes filii Dei estis, “You are all children of God,” can be ii Preface understood on its own, without looking up the context of the verse in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. I have tried to make sure, whenever possible, that the verses included in this book can be read on their own, without requiring any reference to the larger Biblical context. Of course, knowing the context of the verse may enrich the meaning of any verse, and I hope that this book will provide many occasions for you to open up the Latin Bible and explore it more deeply. You will find some items, however, which will not make much sense at all out of context. If you are familiar with the Biblical text, you will probably be able to supply the context. If you are not already familiar with the context of a particular verse, you may need to look up the verse in the Bible, using the citation provided, in order to understand the meaning. For example, the saying Domino et Gedeoni, “For the Lord and for Gideon,” needs to be understood in terms of the story of Gideon’s army as narrated in the Book of Judges, and it will not make much sense without that specific context. The “Vulgate” and the “King James” Bible The origin of the Vulgate Bible dates back to the year 382, when Saint Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus to correct and complete the existing Latin translations of the Bible (these prior Latin translations are often referred to as the “old Latin” Bible, Vetus Latina). Jerome devoted decades to this project, working with the existing Latin translations and also translating from the Greek and Hebrew originals. The result was the “Vulgate” Bible, or Biblia Vulgata in Latin. The Vulgate Bible contains a number of books which are not found in many Protestant Bibles. The so-called “King James” version of the Bible designated a number of books found in the Vulgate Bible as apocryphal. When the King James Bible was first printed in 1611, these apocryphal books were still included, but labeled as apocryphal, while more recent editions of the King James Bible and other Protestant Bible translations do not include these apocryphal books at all. iii Preface As a result, there are some books included in the Vulgate Latin Bible which may be unknown to you, such as Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esdras, Baruch, and Maccabees, as well as additions to the books of Daniel and Esther. If your Bible of reference is the King James version, but you do not find these books in your Bible, you can use the Internet to locate the King James versions of each of these books. Remember: it is not that these books were excluded from the King James version; they were simply labeled as apocryphal. In my opinion, it is quite regrettable that the apocryphal books are, in general, no longer printed in Protestant Bibles, and I would be delighted if reading these verses were to provide you with an opportunity to make your first acquaintance with these beautiful Biblical texts. There are also some differences between the Vulgate Bible and Protestant Bibles in the naming of the Biblical books and in the numbering of the chapters and verses. After considerable thought about this problem, I decided to provide citations in this book according to Protestant naming and numbering conventions, on the assumption that the majority of people using this book would probably have ready access to a Protestant Bible, rather than a Catholic one. For additional help in using this book in conjunction with various editions of the Bible, visit the BibliaVulgata.com website, which has a list of online and printed Biblical text resources that you might find useful in your studies. About Vulgate Latin The Latin of the Vulgate Bible, sometimes still called “vulgar” Latin, represents a more colloquial form of speech than the Latin of classical authors such as Cicero or Seneca. For students of Latin, this is actually quite a bonus! For example, you will find very little use of the accusative plus infinitive construction for indirect discourse in Vulgate Latin. Instead, you will find “quoted speech” which is quite similar to the style of quoted speech used in English today. iv Preface Traditionally, the Vulgate Bible is not punctuated. The absence of punctuation in the Vulgate Bible is probably the single greatest obstacle to the use of the Vulgate Bible by beginning Latin students. In this book, I have punctuated the text, using commas, semicolons, quotation marks and question marks as needed. My goal in doing this was not to enforce any kind of rigid interpretation (every act of punctuation is, of course, an act of interpretation). Instead, my goal is to help you find it easier to read the verses, pausing at the natural pauses, and recognizing quoted speech within the verses. As you become comfortable with Biblical Latin style through the use of this book, you will not find it hard to start reading the traditionally unpunctuated Vulgate Bible. How To Use This Book The 4000 items in this book are organized into approximately 125 grammatical categories, starting with the different classes of nouns, followed by the different tenses, moods and classes of verbs and participles.
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