The Capitulatio Vaticana and Its Predecessors in the Old Testament

Abstract

Chapters 6 and 7 seek to get behind Vaticanus’s ‘First Chapters’. Chapter 6 conducts several asymmetrical studies of OT books in Vaticanus, comparing them with older manuscripts or with literary references that indicate the existence of physical divisions in the texts of earlier models, searching in particular for signs of a legitimate prehistory of the CapVat. From these studies it is concluded that the CapVat numbers predate Vaticanus and existed, for some books at least, by the middle of the third century in instruments created by Origen and known later to Eusebius; that the numbered divisions in Vaticanus correspond closely to the unnumbered divisions in some unmistakably older manuscripts, particularly of Deuteronomy; and that these divisions were originally based on what were perceived as the natural movements of the text, keyed primarily to changes of time or place or subject, or to other logically separable elements, such as lists or other imbedded materials