----- Original Message ---- From: Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>
One of the things I've started doing recently, when I'm teaching Biblical material in some other class, is that I will grab a chunk of the text that I want and format it for them like a single continuous plain old story -- no chapters and verse numbers (I usually provide line numbers so that we can refer to the text in discussion). It suddenly becomes a real live story, with characters, and motives, and things happening, instead of a reference book with long chains of statements only in passing connected to the material around them, which is what it's currently presented as.
I keep wishing someone -- and it's a little surprising that Eerdman's or Fortress don't do this, as much as it is that Oxford or Penguin hasn't, yet -- would publish a complete Bible without chapters and verses. KJV is in the public domain, afaik, but it's not what I would want for studying the Bible, or I would just take that and do it my own self. You could use line numbers, and/or provide marginal references to chapters and verses (along the lines of teh way that Plato and Aristotle are typically handled in a Penguin Classics volume).
In fact, this has always seemed to me like a no-brainer volume for Penguin Classics. I would use it for all my classes where they need to buy a Bible. And I have colleagues (religious ones, too) who agree.