I'm always surprised at reactions from modern readers who seem to think that these sorts of observations are new. It's a particular type of blindness to history. People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago.
Note that we have sources that commented on duplicates by around the 8th century, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soferim_(Talmud)
see the summary comment about Chap viii.
The Talmud describes all kinds of things that you might think are "modern" - ironing clothes (albeit by a different method), rain gutters, complicated financial arrangements (e.g. a contract with a managing partner and a silent partner, the silent partner putting up all the money, but half as a loan to the other partner and half as an investment), fertilizer, complicated property rights (e.g. when have I established a right to prevent someone from blocking my light or building a structure that lets them overlook my private property), methods of fraud detection in written contracts, and so on.
People knew about these duplicates since ancient times and weren't troubled by them. They have had explanations that aren't particularly far-fetched, e.g. that Ps. xviii. and II Sam. xxii are duplicates because one's a historical record of what King David said, and the other is the version he later edited for Psalms. Perhaps modern readers have different explanations, but the mere modernity doesn't automatically make them any better.
People aren't more intelligent now than three thousand years ago.
While I agree that there's a lot to be learned from our ancestors, there's some question about how the average intelligence may have changed over historical times. The Flynn effect suggests that rather large changes can take place across entire populations.
The Flynn effect is too short a timescale. Maybe it was just recent malnutrition from industrialization.
Aside from the fact that cranial capacity has been pretty stable, it's just impossible to believe that intelligence is substantially different if you spend time studying the Talmud, or for that matter Greek philosophers. The Greek philosophers throw people off, because everyone remembers all the science they got wrong.
For instance, in the Talmud, in that kind of transaction I mentioned - the half-loan half-investment deal, where one guy puts up the money and one guy puts up the work, the Talmud notes that the guy doing the work a) received a loan, and b) is working to manage the other guy's investment. Putting two and two together, he's working for the other guy for free, just because he got a loan. I.e., he's paying interest, and therefore this is forbidden under the prohibition against usury unless the investor pays the worker for his time. You can't begin to wrap your head around that kind of stuff unless you have more or less modern intelligence.
I don't really disagree, mainly because the idea that our ancestors were mostly very unintelligent compared to today's average seems absurd given their known accomplishments. However, I do wonder from time to time if that could be explained almost entirely by selection effects. The short timescale of the Flynn effect could possibly be attributed to the lack of reliable tests for g prior to the 20th century, for example...
Nice work. However, given that the Christian Bible has been translated into English (probabaly many times over during the last thousand+ years), wouldn't it make more sense to diff the original Hebrew version?
I'm assuming there's a website where you can retrieve this ...
and split it (more or less) into one word per line.
You'll notice that, in some cases, even when lines or sections are technically different (characters do not exactly match), there is a similarity of words (same roots).
I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone here that the reason certain passages appear twice is because they merited repeating? The Bible is meant to be read by people, and people often times take a while for a message to sink in once they're exposed to it. So it is worth including more important points several times to make them harder to miss. In rhetoric and writing, such repetition is not only taught but considered necessary for good speeches and writings.
Hyperlinked Bible made me laugh. "And God spake unto them, follow this bit.ly link to be reminded of what I did unto the town of Sodom."
Of course, then we'd have comments fields, and someone would have tagged Psalm 51 as "Dupe"... probably Adam, who would also be responsible for writing "FIrST!!" on every Genesis update.
There are also different versions of the ten commandments across religions. (The Catholics had a problem with the ban on graven images, especially given how many of those they had been erecting).
I don't know how this works, given that anyone can pick up a Bible and find the ten commandments. Maybe the Catholics print their own modified version of the Bible?
The reason is that the commandments are not clearly numbered, so it is a matter of interpretation when one commandment ends and the next begins. Different ways of splitting the commandments leads to different interpretation.
In Jewish interpretation the second commandment starts with "do not make an image...", in Catholic and Lutheran interpretation this is part of the first commandment, giving it less emphasis. The numbering of the rest of the commandments are then one off, until the ninth/tenth, which is two separate commandments in the Catholic interpretation.
Interestingly, the catholic church had HUGE problems with the orthodox church during its inception for just that. If you get the chance, you should give "Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire" (http://www.amazon.ca/Byzantium-Surprising-Life-Medieval-Empi...) a read. Its a fascinating glimpse into not only the early church, but the rise, and fall, of an empire.
It started with the Bogomils, I believe it was on some doctrine about whehter we were born in sin, or not. I haven't check wikipedia, trying to type what I remmember from school, but the orthodox church believes that you are born in sin, while the catholic does not. Off course there are other differences.
Atheist myself, I got married in a orthodox church to make my family happy (grandmothers especially). I carry my wedding ring on the right hand (orthodox rules).
But, I wonder what's the point? Such simple differences, and off course others were the cause of wars (real, and cold) between the sects (to be objective, they are all sects) of the christian church.
Ok, so some fights might've been okay - for example our Bulgarian church (orthodox) "fought" against the Greek (also orthodox) to have the sermons told in bulgarian, not greek, because... people did not understood greek. Or to have the bible written in bulgarian.
But now the bulgarian church is fighting within itself, for stupid things like - whether the black monks (I think those are strict monastic monks), can get married vs. the one carrying white. Again, not going to bother checkin the wikipedia on this one. It's just stupid :) Allow them to get married, and continue...
There have been a lot of research into this, and the hypothesis is that genesis was assembled from (at least) four different sources or oral traditions. The two creation stories are clearly from two different traditions, one calls the creator-god "Yahweh" (somewhat misleading translated to "The Lord" in English), the other uses the name "Elohim" (translated to "God" in English). The differences hints to different cultures: "Elohim" separates the waters and creates the dry land, "Yahweh" creates a spring in the desert. This could indicate that the one tradition originates from shore-dwelling people (water is the primary element, land is the exception), the other is from desert nomads (the dry land is primary, water is created by God).
Note that the primary difference between the two psalms when seen in the diff view, is that one uses "God" one uses "The Lord". Hence they are probably the same original song filtered through two different traditions. When the Bible were assembled, the editors took pains to include all traditions, even when the content was overlapping.
That's stupid, ask any orthodox jewish scholar, or hell, read the passages yourself. The first section is 'foreshadowing' for lack of a better term, and the second is the accounts in detail.
They're not exactly the same. Genesis 1 places the creation of animals before humans, whereas the natural reading of Genesis 2 has the reverse:
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them"
(Admittedly some modern evangelical Bibles make this "God had formed every beast". But this seems to be motivated by a desire to harmonize rather than honest translating.)
We should probably distinguish between two levels of explanation: The religious explanation, and the historic/scientific explanation.
The "foreshadowing"-explanation is a religious explanation. The historic/scientific explanation is that the two versions are from two different oral traditions that have been merged into the same book. Both kind of explanation are interesting, but they are also largely incompatible, and I think it always should be made very clear which perspective one is arguing from.
[Psalm 53] is almost identical to Psalm 14, and the two psalms were probably alternate versions of the same hymn before they were included in the Psalter. The two hymns serve the same function, namely, to mourn the fact that mankind does not seek after God and thus treats God's people cruelly.
-- Source: ESV Study Bible (http://www.esvstudybible.org/search?q=psalm+14%2C+53)
I believe Psalm 14 is considered a "song" while Psalm 53 is thought to be an "instructional" sermon. So they very well could be the same message/theme, just modified for singing vs. teaching.
Like a duplicated gene, the two seem to have evolved in different directions over time.
I've read that Torah scrolls have the same kind of transcription errors "inherited" from one copy to the next so the origin of a scroll can be traced back.
What's more likely is that one psalm was copied from the other during the Torah's authorship. Just looking at the translation you can see the use of YHWH (translated as the LORD) in one psalm, and the lack of use of YHWH in the other. This is probably because one psalm was written by J, and the other was copied by E.
Also, I'm not quite sure what kind of transcription errors are permitted in Torah scrolls. They do throw out the entire scroll if there's a significant error. I can't imagine someone duplicating an entire psalm. At most, a letter might be missing from the text.
This isn't copy protection, or even watermarking to identify who's "leaking the source".
Hand-copying text is error-prone, and copies are often made from copies, so there's the chance to reconstruct a "family tree" even after knowledge of what copied from what is lost.
The Psalms are a collection of songs/poems collected orally at several geographic regions in Israel. Most scholars recognize in the neighborhood of five different independent sections.
Thus it should not come as any surprise that a given psalm appears twice with some differences--it was recorded as it was known in two different regions.
I thought this would be about the duplicate passage that constitutes 2 Kings 18:13 - 20:11 and Isaiah 36 - 38:8, although of course for that passage neither occurrence is marked off as an exact "chapter" in the much later numbering scheme for the Bible.
Perhaps more interesting is the case of the book of Deutronomy, the fifth book of the pentateuch, which repeats the same stories appearing in earlier books (often from a slight different perspective).
I've heard (don't know if it is true) that the first sections of the bible were only oral history. Most of it only got written up during the exile in Babylon.
I don't know if it is true or not, but I think it should be taken into account that such things might happen.
It is pretty impressive though that Jews have a 3000? year history - which is pretty unique. My people were still clobbering Romans over the head with blunt instruments 1500 years back.
Also pretty impressive that they have a history that is 3000 years old - yet I can't seem to find 12 year old Geocity pages...
Note that we have sources that commented on duplicates by around the 8th century, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soferim_(Talmud) see the summary comment about Chap viii.
The Talmud describes all kinds of things that you might think are "modern" - ironing clothes (albeit by a different method), rain gutters, complicated financial arrangements (e.g. a contract with a managing partner and a silent partner, the silent partner putting up all the money, but half as a loan to the other partner and half as an investment), fertilizer, complicated property rights (e.g. when have I established a right to prevent someone from blocking my light or building a structure that lets them overlook my private property), methods of fraud detection in written contracts, and so on.
People knew about these duplicates since ancient times and weren't troubled by them. They have had explanations that aren't particularly far-fetched, e.g. that Ps. xviii. and II Sam. xxii are duplicates because one's a historical record of what King David said, and the other is the version he later edited for Psalms. Perhaps modern readers have different explanations, but the mere modernity doesn't automatically make them any better.