Psalm Numbering

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Does anyone know why the psalms are numbered differently in Catholic Bibles than in (for example) the King James Bible?

It looks to me like psalm 10 in the Catholic Bible was extended to include psalm 11 in the King James.

Does anyone know the story behind this?
 
I did a google search and found that it covered in the threads over here.

[thread]419326[/thread]
 
As a side note, this is the reason many Protestants claim Catholics threw out one of the ten commandments. Do a side by side comparison of the numbering, and you will see what really happened.
 
Keep in mind that the Chapter and Verse numbers in the Bible are not really part of the Bible.

Protestant scholar Geddes MacGregor, in his The Bible in the Making (1959), credits Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who became a cardinal in 1206, with the division into chapters in 1227. Cardinal Langton’s system was used in several 13th century manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate.

QUOTE FROM G.M.'S BOOK:

The verse division for the Old Testament was one that had been devised by Rabbi Nathan in 1448 and used in a Venice edition printed in 1524. It had then been adopted into a Latin Bible printed in 1528, which also employed a similar method for dividing up the New Testament. In 1555 another Bible by was issued by Robert Estienne of Paris in which the same verse division was used for the Old Testament, but a different one provided for the New. The Geneva Bible [Protestant] followed the arrangement adopted by Estienne.
 
The following is from the Douay-Rheims Bible online . . . the link is provided below . . .

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. . . :coffeeread: . . .

PREFACE

The Douay-Rheims Bible is a scrupulously faithful translation into English of the Latin Vulgate Bible which St. Jerome (342-420) translated into Latin from the original languages. The Vulgate quickly became the Bible universally used in the Latin Rite (by far the largest rite of the Catholic Church). …

The Latin Vulgate Bible has been read and honored by the Western Church for 1500 years! …

INTRODUCTION

The whole Douay-Rheims Bible was revised and diligently compared with the Latin Vulgate by Bishop Richard Challoner in 1749-1752 A.D. The notes included in the text were written by Dr. Challoner. …

Every effort was made to ensure … an exact match to the original printed version. No words were added or ommitted from the text … No words were rearranged. No verse numbers were changed, except in the case of Psalm 9.

Psalm 9 originally contained 21 verses and there were 2 versions of Psalm 10, numbering 1-18 and 1-8. … it was decided to put the first Psalm 10 in the last part of Psalm 9 and renumber the verses 22-39 … the same numbering for all the Psalms as all the Douay Rheims Bibles. Note, in the Protestant Bibles the numbering of Psalms 10 through 146 differs by one.

:compcoff: Link: drbo.org/index.htm

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Wikipedia describes it thus:

The organization and numbering of the Psalms differs slightly between the (Masoretic) Hebrew and the (Septuagint) Greek manuscripts.

Christian traditions vary:
  • Catholic official liturgical texts follow the Greek numbering, but modern Catholic translations often use the Hebrew numbering, sometimes adding, in parenthesis, the Greek numbering as well.
  • Eastern Orthodox translations are based on the Greek numbering;
  • in the Syriac Orthodox Church Peshitta tradition there are 155 Psalms.
  • Protestant translations are based on the Hebrew numbering.
So it’s not really a “Catholic vs. Protestant” thing, but a “Hebrew vs. Greek” thing.
 
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