Literary Review
CONTENTS
1 A poore man now arrived at the Land of Promise
2 The multitudes of people covered the beautie of the fields
3 He sate among graue, learned and reuerend men
5 I am for the medium in all things
6 The danger never dreamt of, that is the danger
7 O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart
8 We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination â¦
9 When we do luxuriate and grow riotous in the gallantnesse of this world
10 True Religion is in no way a gargalisme only
11 The grace of the fashion of it
12 Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut vp his tender mercies?
B The Six Companies of Translators
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features â¦
If You Loved This, Youâll Like â¦
The making of the King James Bible, in the seven years between its commissioning by James VI & I in 1604 and its publication by Robert Barker, âPrinter to the Kingâs Most Excellent Majestieâ, in 1611, remains something of a mystery. The men who did it, who pored over the Greek and Hebrew texts, comparing the accuracy and felicity of previous translations, arguing with each other over the finest details of chapter and verse, were many of them obscure at the time and are generally forgotten now, a gaggle of fifty or so black-gowned divines whose names are almost unknown but whose words continue to resonate with us. They have a ghost presence in our lives, invisible but constantly heard, enriching the language with the âcivility, learning and eloquenceâ of their translation, but nowadays only whispering the sentences into our ears.
Beyond that private communication, they have left few clues. Surviving in one or two English libraries and archives are the instructions produced at the beginning of the work, a couple of drafts of short sections sketched out in the course of it, some fragments of correspondence between one or two of them and a few pages of notes taken at a meeting near the end. Otherwise nothing.
But that virtual anonymity is the power of the book. The translation these men made together can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English. That it should be the creation of a committee of people no one has ever heard of â and who were generally unacknowledged at the time â is the key to its grandeur. It is not the poetry of a single mind, nor the effusion of a singular vision, nor even the product of a single moment, but the child of an entire culture stretching back to the great Jewish poets and storytellers of the Near Eastern Bronze Age. That sense of an entirely embraced and reimagined past is what fuels this book.
The divines of the first decade of seventeenth-century England were alert to the glamour of antiquity, in many ways consciously archaic in phraseology and grammar, meticulous in their scholarship and always looking to the primitive and the essential as the guarantee of truth. Their translation was driven by that idea of a constant present, the feeling that the riches, beauties, failings and sufferings of Jacobean England were part of the same world as the one in which Job, David or the Evangelists walked. Just as Rembrandt, a few years later, without any sense of absurdity or presumption, could portray himself as the Apostle Paul, the turban wrapped tightly around his greying curls, the eyes intense and inquiring, the King James Translators could write their English words as if the passage of 1,600 or 3,000 years made no difference. Their subject was neither ancient nor modern, but both or either. It was the universal text.
The book they created was consciously poised in its rhetoric between vigour and elegance, plainness and power. It is not framed in the language, as one Puritan preacher described it, of âfat and strutting bishops, pomp-fed prelatesâ, nor of Puritan controversy or intellectual display. It aimed to step beyond those categories to embrace the universality of its subject. As