You know how it goes: Half a verse pops into your head, and you think to yourself, “What’s the whole verse? Where’s that located? What’s its context?” (Or at least you should be asking yourself
So what I usually do is whip out my iPhone, activate Siri, and quote my half a verse to her. Presto, she finds it. Usually on Bible Gateway, with a link I can press to go right to it. Takes all of 15 seconds.
Don’t tell me the olden days were better. They bloody well were not. If you had half a verse in your head and wanted to know where it was in the bible, you had to get out a concordance. If you don’t know what that is, God has been kind to you: It’s a big ol’ book, about five times bigger than a bible, which has every word in
Fr’instance the word “wet” appears five times in the New Living Translation:
Exodus 16.13 : “…the camp was wet with dew.”Leviticus 11.38 : “But if the seed is wet…”Judges 6.37 : “If the fleece is wet with dew…”Judges 6.39 : “…the ground around it is wet with dew.”Job 16.13 : “The ground is wet with my blood.”
Not that stuff doesn’t get wet in the New Testament—people get baptized, remember?—but the translators didn’t use “wet” to describe any of it. “Soaked,” yes. Not “wet.”
Anyway, back in the olden days this is what I had to do when I wanted to find a verse. I had to be home, ’cause that’s where my concordances were, ’cause nobody was yet able to carry books around on their phone. I had to make sure I remembered the verse in the proper translation: My churches had me memorize ’em in the King James Version until I was about 12 or so, and then everything sorta shifted to the New International Version. (Probably ’cause the last anti-
If this all seems like a headache to you, it is. Now imagine life before concordances.
Although sometimes, if you were lucky enough to have one of these people in your community, there’d be a person with an eidetic memory who’d read the bible and could quote most if not all of it. And could tell you the chapter and verse of anything you quoted to them. It’s like having a human Siri. I once met a woman who could do that; it was neat. You could have her recall verse address after verse address all day, for fun, and she found it fun too.