A few years ago I became intrigued with the idea of "who said what" as recorded in the scriptures. By this I mean who are the speakers aside from the narration of the text. Identifying the speaker in the text sounds like a trivial excerise, but as you get into it you quickly discover that much can be gained simply by asking the question "who is speaking." I set out to identify each speaker by building a series of Word documents (one for each book of the Bible) with the words of spoken text highlighted in blue and narrated text in black. For extra distinction I put the words of God in red text (much like what you see in most new testament copies of the Bible). When you do this a number of things jump out immediately. First of all, acknowledging the speaker gives extra meaning to the words spoken. It also humanizes the characters in the Bible in a way that helps to identify with them as real people. More importantly, very often you find the text itself can be best understood, even clarified, when you consider the speaker.
To date I am near the end of the book of Joshua in my Word document build out highlighting the speakers in each chapter. I have also started summarizing my findings by tracking the number of speakers and "unique" speakers (i.e. speaker who are introduced for the first time in the text) in a spreadsheet. I am posting the results of this information on my Voices in Scripture project page. This will be a work in progress of course with deadlines or timeline for completion. I'll just add more information as I find the time. I expect to use the completed Words documents and spreadsheet to build other useful tools related to this project. I am really learning a lot from this little exercise!
