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Bible Bi"ble (b[imac]"b l), n. [F. bible, L. biblia, pl., fr. Gr. bibli`a, pl. of bibli`on, dim. of bi`blos, by`blos, book, prop. Egyptian papyrus.] 1. A book. [Obs.] --Chaucer. [1913 Webster]

2. {The Book} by way of eminence, -- that is, the book which is made up of the writings accepted by Christians as of divine origin and authority, whether such writings be in the original language, or translated; the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; -- sometimes in a restricted sense, the Old Testament; as, King James s Bible; Douay Bible; Luther s Bible. Also, the book which is made up of writings similarly accepted by the Jews; as, a rabbinical Bible. [1913 Webster]

3. A book containing the sacred writings belonging to any religion; as, the Koran is often called the Mohammedan Bible. [1913 Webster]

4. (Fig.) a book with an authoritative exposition of some topic, respected by many who are experts in the field. [PJC]

{Bible Society}, an association for securing the multiplication and wide distribution of the Bible.

{Douay Bible}. See {Douay Bible}.

{Geneva Bible}. See under Geneva. [1913 Webster]

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Bible [baibl] Biblia
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Bible [baibl] Bible, Ecriture sainte
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bible Bibel
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Bible Bibbia
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Bible Dictionary

Bible
The Bible is the name given to the revelation of God to mancontained in sixty-six books or pamphlets, bound together andforming one book and only one, for it has in reality one authorand one purpose and plan, and is the development of one schemeof the redemption of man. I. ITS [301]Names

(1) The Bible,i.e. The Book, from the Greek "ta biblia," the books. The wordis derived from a root designating the inner bark of the lindentree, on which the ancients wrote their books. It is the bookas being superior to all other books. But the application ofthe word BIBLE to the collected books of the Old and NewTestaments is not to be traced farther back than the fifthcentury of our era. (2) The Scriptures, i.e. the writings, asrecording what was spoken by God. (3) The Oracles, i.e. thethings spoken, because the Bible is what God spoke to man, andhence also called (4) The Word. (5) The Testaments orCovenants, because it is the testimony of God to man, thetruths to which God bears witness; and is also the covenant oragreement of God with man for his salvation. (6) The Law, toexpress that it contains God s commands to men. II.COMPOSITION

The Bible consists of two great parts, called theOld and New Testaments, separated by an interval of nearly fourhundred years. These Testaments are further divided intosixty-six books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament andtwenty-seven in the New. These books are a library inthemselves being written in every known form old literature.Twenty-two of them are historical, five are poetical, eighteenare prophetical, twenty-one are epistolary. They containlogical arguments, poetry, songs and hymns, history, biography,stories, parables, fables, eloquence, law, letters andphilosophy. There are at least thirty-six different authors,who wrote in three continents, in many countries, in threelanguages, and from every possible human standpoint. Amongthese authors were kings, farmers, mechanics, scientific men,lawyers, generals, fishermen, ministers and priests, atax-collector, a doctor, some rich, some poor, some city bred,some country born--thus touching all the experiences of menextending over 1500 years. III. UNITY

And yet the Bible isbut one book, because God was its real author, and therefore,though he added new revelations as men could receive them, henever had to change what was once revealed. The Bible is aunit, because (1) It has but one purpose, the salvation of men.(2) The character of God is the same. (3) The moral law is thesame. (4) It contains the development of one great scheme ofsalvation. IV. ORIGINAL LANGUAGES

The Old Testament waswritten in Hebrew, a Shemitic language, except that parts ofthe books of Ezra (ezra 5:8; 6:12; 7:12-26) and of Daniel(daniel 2:4-7,28) and one verse in Jeremiah (jeremiah 10:11)were written in the Chaldee language. The New Testament iswritten wholly in Greek. V. ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS OF THEORIGINAL

There are no ancient Hebrew manuscripts older thanthe tenth century, but we know that these are in the maincorrect, because we have a translation of the Hebrew intoGreek, called the Septuagint, made nearly three hundred yearsbefore Christ. Our Hebrew Bibles are a reprint from what iscalled the Masoretic text. The ancient Hebrew had only theconsonant printed, and the vowels were vocalized inpronunciation, but were not written. Some Jewish scholarsliving at Tiberias, and at Sora by the Euphrates, from thesixth to the twelfth century, punctuated the Hebrew text, andwrote is the vowel points and other tone-marks to aid in thereading of the Hebrew; and these, together with notes ofvarious kinds, they called Masora (tradition), hence the nameMasoretic text. 0F the Greek of the New Testament there are anumber of ancient manuscripts They are divided into two kinds,the Uncials, written wholly in capitals, and the Cursives,written in a running hand . The chief of these are-- (1) theAlexandrian (codex alexandrinus, marked a), so named because itwas found in Aiexandria in Egypt, in 1628. It date back to A.D.350, and is now in the British Museum. (2) The Vatican (codexvaticanus, b), named from the Vatican library at Rome, where itis kept. Its date is A.D. 300 to 325. (3) The Sinaitic (codexsinaiticus) so called from the convent of St. Catherine onMount Sinai, there it was discovered by or Tichendorf in 1844.It is now at St. Petersburg Russia. This is one of the earliestbest of all the manuscripts. VI. TRANSLATIONS

The OldTestament was translated into Greek by a company of learnedJews at Alexandria, who began their labor about the year B.C.286. It is called the Septuagint, i.e. the seventy, from thetradition that it was translated by seventy (more exactlyseventy-two) translators. The Vulgate, or translation of theBible into Latin by Jerome, A.D. 385-405, is the authorizedversion of the Roman Catholic Church. The first Englishtranslation of the whole Bible was by John DeuteronomyWickliffe (1324-1384). Then followed that of William Tyndale(1525) and several others. As the sum and fruit of all theseappeared our present Authorized Version, or King James Version,in 1611. It was made by forty-seven learned men, in two yearsand nine months, with a second revision which took nine monthslonger. These forty-seven formed themselves into six companies,two of whom met at Westminster, two at Oxford and two atCambridge. The present English edition is an improvement, intypographical and grammatical correctness, upon this revision,and in these respects is nearly perfect. [See [302]Versions,Authorized] A REVISED VERSION of this authorized edition wasmade by a group of American and English scholars, and in 1881the Revised New Testament was published simultaneously in theUnited States and England. Then followed the Revised OldTestament in 1885, and the Apocrypha in 1894. The Americanrevision committee was permitted to publish its own revision,which appeared in 1901 as the American Standard Version.Modern-speech translations have been made from time to timebetween 1898-1945. Among these were Moulton s Modern Reader sBible, the Twentieth century New Testament, Weymouth s,Moffatt s, and the American translation. As a result of themodern-speech translations that have appeared and been widelyreceived, the American Revision Committee set to work again,and in 1946 the Revised Standard Version of the New Testamentwas published. VII. DIVISIONS INTO CHAPTERS AND VERSES

Thepresent division of the whole Bible into chapters was made byCardinal Hugo Deuteronomy St. Gher about 1250. The presentdivision into verses was introduced by Robert Stephens in hisGreek Testament, published in 1551, in his edition of theVulgate, in 1555. The first English Bible printed with thesechapters and verses was the Geneva Bible, in 1560. VIII.CIRCULATION OF THE BIBLE

The first book ever printed was theBible; and more Bibles have been printed than any other book.It has been translated, in its entirety or in part, into morethan a thousand languages and dialects and various systems forthe blind. The American Bible Society (founded in 1816) alonehas published over 356 million volumes of Scripture.