Number of verses in Genesis 17

[jirehhuang]

I'm having trouble finding any source for 28 verses in Genesis 17. May I ask why this choice was made?

[joecookcoding]

Thank you for pointing this out. Genesis 17 contains 27 verses, so the reference to 28 verses is incorrect. This appears to be a data/entry error rather than an intentional decision, it should be corrected. Fell free to submit a PR with this change.

[jirehhuang]

Thanks for the response! Before I do, may I ask what the intended source of truth is because there seem to be a number of discrepancies based on what I expected, which is 31,102 total verses (source, by verse).

[joecookcoding]

That is my understanding 31,102 is the correct total amount of verses.
@avendesora ?

[avendesora]

That dictionary lists the max verse number (and, implicitly, max chapter number) for each book/chapter. Chapter and verse numbers are fairly standardized in modern versions but can vary widely in older translations (Psalms is probably the most obvious example). That dictionary was generated from a collection of open source and public domain English translations, so I assume one of them had 28 verses for Genesis 17. I'll try to verify that as soon as possible, but I'm away from my computer for the next day or so. That said, we should probably have a dictionary with the most common chapter and verse numbers that is used in some cases rather than the max. The deeper I get into this the more exceptions and corner cases I find. Which is very interesting but causes difficulties in a tool like this library.

[avendesora]

Okay, so the edition of the Douay-Rheims translation that I have has the following for Genesis 17:26-28.

26. dummy verses inserted by amos 27. And all the men of his house, as well they that were born in his house, as the bought servants and strangers were circumcised with him. 28. The selfsame day was Abraham circumcised and Ismael his son.

All other translations seem to have verse 28 as verse 26, and the online versions of Douay-Rheims that I've checked after a brief search seem to also have verse 28 as verse 26, so I think we should probably just update the version in this library to be the same.

So, we can, at the very least, update that dictionary to have a max verse of 27 for Genesis 17. I can do that, or either one of you can submit a PR for that if you want.

I will also update the Douay-Rheims version we are using. I'll try to find a better source, since I'm very reluctant to just manually update the actual Biblical text.

Thanks for finding and reporting this. Let me know if either of you are planning to submit a PR; otherwise, I'll make both updates.

[jirehhuang]

Thanks for digging into this, Nathan! I'm happy to take care of the PR for the dictionary, later this week. FYI, there are a significant number of additional discrepancies with the KJV verse counts, in case you are interested into looking into it. I have updated the verse counts to align with the KJV for my own purposes here. Note that this source seems to have a large number of typos, so my updated KJV numbers are based on this XML and cross-checked with biblehub.

[avendesora]

Thanks for the PR! I approved and merged it.

I plan to do a new release sometime this week and will include that change.

I need to give more thought to a "standard" dictionary of chapter and verse numbers that is used instead of the max dictionary in some cases. Basing it off of KJV is probably good. It includes more verses than some other translations like ASV (which puts some verses from Mark and John into the footnotes due to manuscript evidence, if I remember correctly). But I should probably do a comparison between several popular versions just to make sure the "standard" is as standard as possible. I might try to get that in place before the next release.

The next release is splitting the actual Bible text out into separate packages/libraries for each version that can be optionally installed. It was getting too big and most people will only care about a single version, if that. So going with a standard dictionary for chapter and verse numbers (with maybe the ability to override it in the optional libraries) fits in with the rest of the release, I think.

Anyway, thanks again!