Vulgate Verses: 4000 Verses from the Bible

2022·1.2 MB·Latin

by  Laura Gibbs

2nd edition, January 29 2022. Vulgate Verses by Laura Gibbs is
now licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
VULGATE VERSES

4000 Sayings from the Bible for
Teachers and Students of Latin

by Laura Gibbs, Ph.D.
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.
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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
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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.

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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.

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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. The footer at the bottom of
each page tells you the grammatical category. Within each
grammatical category, the verses are divided into groups that
contain anywhere from 10 to 20 items. Each group gives you
a manageable number of verses to work through in a typical
study session.

Search the Verses
There is not an index in this book, as the indexing of such a
collection is difficult to do in print form. An alphabetical
index by incipit is not much help, and an index by key words
or by Biblical citation would be almost as long again as the
book itself. So, if you want to search for specific verses,
please use the search engine which is available at the
BibliaVulgata.com website. Just type in the word(s) of the
verse you are looking for, and you will be taken to a page
that gives you the reference number for the verse as it
appears in this book.
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Preface
Study Tip: Reading Verses Out Loud
In addition to practicing your Latin grammar, I hope you will
also want to appreciate the meaning of these verses. For
deciphering the grammar, you will want to have your Latin
textbook and dictionary close at hand - and for a full
appreciation of the meaning of the verses, you need to read
the verses out loud. There is a deeply oral quality to Biblical
Latin which can only be appreciated through oral recitation.

When you read aloud, please don’t worry about your accent.
Perhaps you use the Ecclesiastical style of pronunciation, or
perhaps you use the reconstructed Classical pronunciation.
Either one is fine! Over the thousands of years in which Latin
was a widely spoken language, there were countless different
Latin accents. If you are an English speaker, you will speak
Latin with an English accent, and that’s okay. If you know
some Spanish or French or Italian, you may find it easier to
pronounce the Latin with a Spanish or French or Italian
accent. The main thing is to make sure that you pronounce
every vowel. Unlike English, Latin has no silent vowels.

As you read, read slowly (very slowly), and pause where
there is a clear grammatical break. This means you need to
understand the grammar of the verse in order to read it
properly. Here are some examples with the grammatical
breaks marked for you:

Verbum Domini ~ verum est.
Amici divitum ~ multi.
Bona et mala ~ a Deo sunt.
Omnia ~ possibilia sunt ~ apud Deum.
Dominus Deus noster ~ Deus unus est.

By reading the verses out loud and emphasizing the logical
pauses as you read, you will also get a feel for the parallel
structures which are especially common in Biblical Latin. For
more help with Latin reading, check out the audio materials
available at the companion website for this book,
BibliaVulgata.com.
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