Women and Wives: the Language of Marriage in Early Modern English Biblical Translations

Abstract

The article shows the ways in which an idiom of marriage became normative in early modern English translations of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on successive biblical versions (especially from Tyndale's translation, published in 1530/1 and the first based on the Hebrew original, to the Authorized Version published in 1611), it shows how Hebrew terms relating to a variety of domestic and sexual union were rendered in English biblical versions in a language pertaining to monogamous matrimony. This was further amplified in adjacent textual commentaries and notes. The use of a contemporary language of marriage in early modern biblical translations was not unlike the ways in which early modern commentator perceived social relations in other remote cultures and filtered them through their own world view. Translators and readers were also relying on long-standing and strong traditions which anchored Christian notions of matrimony in the ancient Hebrew text. However the early modern English biblical idiom of marriage should also be seen in the context of contemporary efforts on behalf of both religious and secular authorities to regulate the institution of marriage. Textual readings and social history are brought together to suggest links between histories of marriage, the church, print culture, and the English bible.