tablesaw: -- (Default)
Tablesaw Tablesawsen ([personal profile] tablesaw) wrote2002-06-09 05:47 am

It's the only version of the Bible Satan hasn't messed with!

Friday's New York Times Crossword took me far longer than usual. Most of that time was dedicated to problems surrounding one clue:

36 Down: Fourth Commandment subject (seven letters)

Now, I don't know what you learned in your Sunday school, but throughout my thirteen years of year-round Catholic schooling, I learned that the Fourth Commandment is "Honor thy mother and father." So I was mightily surprised when, to solve the puzzle, I had to scrap what I knew to be true (and what the Catechism had backed me up on) and replace my answer, PARENTS, with SABBATH.

This type of thing happens every so often. I got a grid screwed up because the answer to "Book before Esth." turned out to be NEH instead of JUD. (Nehemiah precedes Esther in the Protestant canon, but in the Roman Catholic canon, Judith precedes it.)

But book differences are a minor thing. It's incredibly aggravating to have to fill in something one knows is incorrect to finish a puzzle. This is a major change, and a Catholic solving this puzzle is made to feel marginalized. If something like that is going to be significantly different for a significant percentage of the population, should there be a note of it?

Jack Chick may believe that the King James Bible is the only version that Satan hasn't messed with, but I refuse to believe that the majority of people concur.

ThuNYTX: 13. FriNYTX: 38. SatNYTX: 20:30. SatLATX: 16:22. SunNYTX: 36. I'm still not certain all of my answers are correct, I'll need to check tomorrow. SunLATX: 18:15.

[identity profile] davidglasser.livejournal.com 2002-06-09 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Ok, this is just my ignorance of Catholicism coming into play, and I apologize that my house only has Jewish bibles, but is the ordering in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 just blatantly different between the original Hebrew text and the Catholic version?

(Although I can certainly understand your problem with the Esther question: my bible has Ecclesiastes before it!)

[identity profile] inkylj.livejournal.com 2002-06-09 09:24 pm (UTC)(link)
To the best of my knowledge, it's not that the order is different, it's that the verses are broken down differently. I believe catholics take "I am the Lord thy God" as a preamble, not as a commandment in itself, which shifts everything up one, and then they get back to ten by splitting the tenth commandment into "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" and "thou shalt not covert thy neighbor's goods". I am assisted in this by
http://www.ainglkiss.com/10com/, which helpfully differentiates between "Christians" and "Catholic Christians". And presumably this breaking-down extends to the actual verses as printed in whatever version of the bible you've got. I have the vague idea different catholic-protestant treatment of the first and second commandments has something to do with their respective position on saints but perhaps I am just making this up.

Also, this points up an issue on putting the ten commandments up in schools/public places, viz, whose set would you put up.