The King James Bible and the World It Made

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION David Lyle Jeffrey T he very notion that words can make a world has its obvious root in the Hebrew of the first book of the Bible. There, however, we are told that the word (davar), and the work and works (davar, davarim) of which all Scripture is both witness and legacy, are not reducible to social construction. Nor can human kings or moguls of culture claim to have authored the world’s best-selling book. Moreover, if a certain translation of the Scriptures in but one of the many later tongues has had an outstanding cultural influence, which here we claim, this is not simply a matter of legacy. Though the authors of this volume show how the influence of the King James Version has been extraordinarily farreaching and formative, it will be clear that, as with all translations, the one which first appeared on May 5, 1611, was neither entirely original nor actually progenitive of any “world” except analogously; we are obviously using this phrase in a grand metaphorical sense. Yet the very fact that such a metaphor is possible, that its analogy to the divine fiat holds just so far as to illumine and explain a culture far removed and alien from the culture of both Testaments, is remarkable. What the distinguished scholarly authors of this volume are able to show, no less, is that this single, authoritative translation of the Bible became the authentic voice of Scripture for English-speaking peoples worldwide for more than three centuries. From Britain to America, Canada, Australia, and even Africa and Southeast Asia, for the sheep of innumerable flocks to hear their shepherd’s voice and recognize it trustingly was to hear it in this one English version above all others. 2 David Lyle Jeffrey This kind of authority is religious, of course, but precisely because of that quite naturally it grew to be more broadly cultural. From the seventeenth century forward, the KJV became overwhelmingly the Bible of poets, playwrights, and fiction writers, whether Catholic (James Joyce), Jewish (Anthony Hecht, Saul Bellow), or Protestant (from Jonathan Swift to T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marilynne Robinson, and Richard Wilbur).1 For similar reasons, the high style of the KJV became the lingua franca of English common law, and not just as we find it in the work of F. W. Maitland, Coke’s Institutes, or Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.2 Phrases and cadences from the KJV have echoed in the political rhetoric of many countries; one thinks of Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli in Britain, but also of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, to name just a few of the American presidents who have crafted their speeches so as to borrow its aura of authority.3 The deliberately archaic “voice” of the King James Version was a result of the decision to use certain older forms of formal English in preference to street idiom in the royal translation. This gave, as Laura Knoppers here demonstrates, an effect of “majesty” to its phrasing, a dignity especially apparent in public reading, where the rhetorical character of literally rendered Hebrew made “Hebraisms” in English seem more naturally to express a divine quality in speech. That this effect, howsoever intended by the translators, was even better appreciated by royalists after Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth was defeated in 1660 was perhaps, she suggests, a consequence of political more than theological aims. Alister McGrath puts it succinctly: the King James translation privileged “the language of the court.” But rhetorical “majesty” was not an unwarranted inference from poetic portions of the Old Testament in which it is God who is represented as speaking, as a careful reading aloud of the passages given to God in the “whirlwind” speeches at the end of Job or in his “Comfort ye my people” speech in Isaiah 40 will make clear. That this “high poetry” was almost certainly an intention of the original authors may be confirmed in these and many other passages simply by reading them in Hebrew. The poetry of these speeches is “majestic,” as we say, and the KJV captures more of it than other translations. G. F. Handel’s brilliant musical settings in his Messiah seasonally call this to mind even for those readers who turn no more to its “dated” pages. What has been lost to those who no longer read the King James Version even silently is more than meets...