The King James Bible and the World It Made

7 THE QUESTION OF ELOQUENCE IN THE KING JAMES VERSION

135 Seven THE QUESTION OF ELOQUENCE IN THE KING JAMES VERSION Robert Alter If there is a single attribute large numbers of readers attach almost reflexively to the King James Version, it is most likely eloquence. The warrant for this attribution is abundantly evident. Eloquence, a term associated with oratory, especially delivered orally, suggests a powerful marshalling of the resources of language to produce a persuasive effect, and that quality is manifested in verse after verse of the 1611 translation. It is an intrinsic quality of this English rendering of the Bible that no doubt has been heightened by the virtually canonical status the King James Bible came to enjoy and by the performance of passages from it in ecclesiastical settings or on other solemn occasions. If it became almost a convention in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s to introduce a sonorous recitation of the Twenty-Third Psalm in deathbed scenes, this biblical illumination of the cinematic moment was surely felt to be appropriate because the beautifully cadenced language of the King James Version of that psalm is such a moving expression of trust in God even in life’s darkest moments. The eloquence of the 1611 translation nevertheless deserves some scrutiny in regard to its sources, its nature, its relation to the original language of the Bible, and the degree to which it may or may not be pervasive in these English renderings of the biblical texts. Let me propose at the outset that the eloquence of the narrative prose and the eloquence of the poetry are not cut from the same cloth, however much readers tend to lump them together, something they may be encouraged to do by the fact that the King James Bible provides no typographical differentiation 136 Robert Alter between poetry and prose. For the prose, the committees convened by King James adopted a translation strategy, adumbrated by Tyndale a century earlier, meant to create close equivalents for the Hebrew diction and syntax, and that resulted in a particular kind of forceful effect which was new in English. An exemplary instance is the beginning of the report of the flood in Genesis 7:17-21. And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up upon the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.* It should be said that the flood story, though it shares certain features with other kinds of narrative prose in the Bible, is not entirely typical because in its solemnity and in its rhythmically choreographed account of portentous primeval events it has—both in the passages drawn from the J and, even more, from the P document—a kind of epic grandeur. That, of course, is precisely an occasion for the exhibition of eloquence, which is finely exploited by the 1611 translators. The parallel syntax of the Hebrew, elsewhere deployed for other purposes, here is used to present a stately parade of clauses linked by “and” that report the sequence of momentous acts in which the whole earth is covered by the waters of the flood. Laying everything out in these parallel structures is not, I think, a natural way to package units of syntax in English, though it became a viable option for literary English after the King James Version. The King James translators, by following the syntactic contours of the Hebrew, achieved a new kind of compelling effect, at once lofty and almost stark. The antithetical strategy of modern translations of the Bible by sundry scholarly-ecclesiastical committees has been to repackage the syntax of the original in order to convey a sense that it might have been written in the twentieth century. What is lost in eloquence is palpable. Compare, for example, “And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters,” * Emphasis in biblical quotations is original throughout. The Question...