Front matter
Reading edition
Produced by Dennis McCarthy
(Latin Vulgate, Esther) : Liber Esther
This is a complete electronic ASCII text of the Book of Esther from the Latin Clementine Vulgate, sections translated from the Greek Septuagint included, with section headers, footnotes, and appendicies.
notes concerning this file:
transcriber: Dennis McCarthy 261 South Colonial Homes Circle, N.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30309-1226
Dedicated to the Memory of Agnes Dorothy [Baxter] Aldridge (1909 November 22 - 1996 April 20)
1996 December 08 1997 February 02 (revised)
Source: P. Michael Hetzenauer, Ord. Min. Cap. editor. Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis: Sixti V Pont. Max. Iussa Recognita et Clemens VIII Auctoritate Edita. Neo Eboraci et Cincinnati: apud Fr. Pustet & Co. 1914.
I have transcribed from this source as accurately as possible for this e-text, with the following changes: 1) I formatted each verse into a separate line and added the chapter number to each verse number. In doing this I lost the source's paragraph structure. 2) I exploded the ligatures for "ae" and "oe" into two characters rather than one character for each diphthong. 3) I capitalized all of the section headings which were either in bold or italicized print originally. These sections headings may not be original to the Vulgate, but then neither are verse numbers. 4) I have included alternate line numbers in the headers to the sections translated from the Greek Sepuagint version. These alternate chater/verse numbers correspond to the numbering of these sections in the New American Bible, which follows the Septuagint arrangement, rather than the Vulgate arrangement which places all of those sections at the end. 5) In all references to verses I used a colon to separate the chapter number and verse number rather than a comma as in the source. 6) I placed the footnote designators in parentheses and re-lettered them for the whole body of the text. The original recycled to "a" for each new page. I also arranged the cross reference footnotes themselves into one chart at the end of the text. 7) I moved the marginal notations into an appendix.
Please note that some sentence-like sections end with a period, but the following line does not begin with a capital letter. I recommend that this format remain. The source's editor seems to have been quite confident in the propriety of this approach. I have retained all of the source's capitalization and punctuation except for the section headers.
65 is the target line length, but because of the length of many of the Latin words, my desire not to create "orphan" words, and a genuine lack of talent on the part of the transcriber for such matters, the margination is rather ragged.