John Bois's Annotated Septuagint and the King James Bible

Abstract

This article uses an annotated copy of the 1587 edition of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, as a window onto the relationship between biblical criticism and vernacular translation in early seventeenth-century England. The author recently identified the book's annotator as John Bois (1561–1644), one of the principal translators of the King James Bible of 1611. The article explains why this and other material pertaining to Bois and the King James Version has previously been overlooked and considers how further evidence might be uncovered in the future. As Bois's annotations indicate, translators' decisions were shaped by questions that scholars throughout post-Reformation Europe were asking about the Bible's cultural context, composition, and transmission. These technical questions all had important theological implications, which scholars of biblical translation will only be able to appreciate if they expand their horizons beyond national boundaries and look at Latin sources alongside vernacular ones.