"As in Water Face to Face": The Hebrew Bible and the KJV

Abstract

The King James Bible, which celebrated its four hundredth anniversary in 2011, is by general consensus the most influential book ever published in English, a formative presence within the history of English literature, high and low, and within the very weave of the language. The papers that follow will take up some of the causes and some of the consequences of that legacy. In these introductory remarks I want simply to provide some historical context and to propose that the KJV deserves its privileged place, not only on historical and stylistic grounds, as a venerable relic and model of English prose, but as a faithful translation, a window onto the ancient texts, which, though it may color the original, distorts it less than do most modern versions. Two major factors lie behind the success of the KJV: the Reformation belief that every Christian should have direct access to God’s word—a belief that lent enormous urgency to the work of translation—and the rapid evolution of sixteenth-century English. It is no coincidence that the two periods of greatest activity in biblical translation, the sixteenth century and the years since the Second World War, have been the periods of most rapid linguistic change. The former saw the solidification of prose syntax and an ever accelerating lexical expansion, which reached its statistical peak precisely in 1611. In the modern period, by contrast, syntax has become less precise and subtle, and the equally precipitous growth in vocabulary has been largely confined to registers unrelated to biblical translation. Where the early English translators were buoyed by a sense of urgent mission and the ever greater resources provided by the language, their modern successors have worked in a restricted medium on a text that is less and less central to the larger culture.