The Making of the English Bible

By Gerald Hammond

A renowned Bible scholar examines how the Hebrew text has been interpreted—and misinterpreted—from the Renaissance to modern times.

In this wide-ranging and authoritative study, Gerald Hammond sheds light on how the Bible has evolved over centuries of English-language translation. His extensive analysis begins in the sixteenth century with William Tyndale’s pioneering work. This early text is contrasted with the seventeenth century authorized version, showing how each in their own ways attempted to bring the meaning and nuance of the Hebrew scripture to English readers.

Between these towering Renaissance works, Hammond examines the two Bibles translated by Miles Coverdale; the Geneva Bible; the Bishops’ Bible; and the Catholic Bible. He also offers incisive criticism of the New English Bible, demonstrating that—in the pursuit of accessibility above all—the newer translations seem to have given up on what should be essential: faithful adherence to the source.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504081269

Gerald Hammond

Gerald Hammond was born in Bournemouth, Hampshire, England, to Frederick Arthur Lucas, a physician, and Maria Birnie, a nursing sister. He and his wife, Gilda Isobel Watt, have three sons: Peter, David, and Steven. Hammond graduated from the Aberdeen School of Architecture in 1952 and served in the British Army from 1944–1945. He was an architect for thirty years before retiring to Scotland to write full-time in 1982. Hammond has written more than fifty novels since the late 1960s, sometimes writing under the pseudonyms Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden.

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Introduction

The Authorized Version and the New English Bible

… wee haue not tyed our selues to an vniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peraduenture would wish we had done, because they obserue, that some learned men some where, haue beene as exact as they could that way.… But, that we should expresse the same notion in the same particular word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greeke word once by Purpose, neuer to call it Intent; if one where Iourneying, neuer Traveiling; if one where Thinke, neuer Suppose; if one where Paine, neuer Ache; if one where Ioy, neuer Gladnesse, &c. Thus to minse the matter, wee thought to sauour more of curiositie then wisedome, and that rather it would breed scorne in the Atheist, then bring profite to the godly Reader. For is the kingdome of God become words or syllables?

from the Preface to the Authorized Version

Nearly four hundred years on ‘yes’ is, ironically, the answer which the advocate of the Authorized Version must make to this question. ‘Yes’ because there has been so great a shift in our attitude to translating the Bible. The whole range of Renaissance approaches, from Puritan pedantry to Catholic dogmatism, stands in one camp utterly opposed to what the modern translator attempts—and at the basis of the opposition is the way we regard, if not words and syllables, then words and syntax.

The opening words of the Song of Songs, in Hebrew, are yishaqeni minshiqot pihu, literally (with one hyphenated unit corresponding to one Hebrew word): ‘let-him-kiss-me with-kisses-of his-mouth’. Miles Coverdale, who had no firsthand knowledge of the Hebrew, had translated them like this in his 1535 Bible: ‘O that thy mouth would give me a kiss’. This is attractive enough as the beginning of the love song, but it is grammatically and semantically misleading. In the Hebrew the speaker is not addressing a person but talking about him and she asks for a number of kisses, not one. By 1611 the English rendering had become completely literal: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’ The trouble with this, for the modern English translator, is that it presents logical and linguistic weaknesses. To kiss with a kiss is tautologous: even more so is to kiss with a kiss of the mouth. These are not weaknesses in the original Hebrew any more than are any language’s idioms, but the modern translator believes in translating not word for word but idiom for idiom—hence the New English Bible’s modern idiomatic equivalent: ‘that he may smother me with kisses’. Now the rebarbatively alien tautologies have been replaced by an immediately acceptable modern phrase. But in rejecting the alien and introducing the familiar the modern version has ceased to be a translation. Set against even the unscholarly Coverdale’s version it has lost everything which makes the Hebrew so erotically powerful. ‘The mouth’ may appear tautologous, but it is not—both Coverdale and the Authorized Version had embedded in their renderings the implication that the kissing will be of the frankest and most mutual kind, mouth to mouth. In the New English Bible there is no mutuality: smothering with kisses presents only one-sided abundance.

There is a more general point to be made here: that to translate meaning while ignoring the way that meaning has been articulated is not translation at all but merely replacement—murdering the original instead of recreating it. It is partly a matter of the creative inferiority of the modern translators: normally they are scholars and exegetes whose instincts are to replace the dangerous ambiguities of poetry with the safer specificities of prose. They do not see that the life of anything written lies in its words and syntax. While the Renaissance Bible translator saw half of his task as reshaping English so that it could adapt itself to Hebraic idiom the modern translator wants to make no demands on the language he translates into.

This is something which goes far beyond Bible translation. Walter Benjamin’s introduction to a translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, called ‘The Task of the Translator’, addresses just this point. He builds his thesis on the argument that the form of expression is, in large part, the nature of what is expressed. For the translator not to betray this fact he must above all give ‘a literal rendering of the syntax’ thereby proving ‘words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator’; and he quotes Rudolf Pannwitz’s argument that ‘the basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue’. Benjamin’s conclusion is, intriguingly, that ‘the interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation’. Now the Authorized Version is close enough to its original for it not to ask great efforts from us to turn it into such a prototype—its word order is for many verses at a time the word order of the original and it translates the great majority of Hebrew idioms literally. But what survives as Hebraic in the New English Bible is, more often than not, only the translators’ occasional remembrances of the Authorized Version.

Sometimes, when they are the result of scholarly emendation, the modern translation’s changes are understandable, if still regrettable. In Job 19:20, for instance, this can have been the only reason for turning the Authorized Version’s splendidly literal

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth

into the New English Bible’s

My bones stick out through my skin,

and I gnaw my underlip with my teeth.

But too often the change seems to come from either a resentment at the poetic possibilities of Old Testament Hebrew or a feeling that modern readers are idiots incapable of any kind of imaginative interpretative response. How else can we understand what happens to 1 Samuel 25:37? This verse describes Nabal’s awakening after a night of drunkenness to be told by his wife Abigail how she had saved him from David’s wrath. This is from the Authorized Version:

But it came to pass in the morning, when the wine was gone out of Nabal, and his wife had told him these things, that his heart died within him, and he became as a stone.

Here the most expressive phrase is ‘his heart died within him’—a literal translation of the Hebrew, it carries into English the simultaneously physical and spiritual effects of what Nabal hears. Why do the modern translators abandon this and render it, as the New English Bible does, ‘and he had a seizure and lay there like a stone’? If the answer is that today’s readers would not understand the literal meaning of the original, then today’s readers must have extraordinarily limited interpretative capacities. If the answer is that the Hebrew really means ‘had a seizure’, but in a primitive culture the only way to express such medical details was figuratively, then why not treat ‘lay there like a stone’ the same and translate it as ‘lay paralysed’?

There are many such examples. In 1 Kings 22:27 the king orders Micaiah to be thrown into prison. The Authorized Version renders it:

Put this fellow in the prison, and feed him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until I come in peace.

The expressive Hebrew phrases here are lechem lachats and mayyim. lachats. Lachats is a noun derived from a verb meaning ‘to squeeze, press, oppress’, so that ‘bread of oppression’ and ‘water of oppression’ are, as we might expect, literal renderings. Any reader will grasp that the phrases mean a prison diet of bread and water, but it is the ponderousness of expression which makes the king’s sentence so forbidding. All the effect disappears, though, when the New English Bible spells out the meaning:

‘Lock this fellow up’, he said, ‘and give him prison diet of bread and water until I come home in safety.’

What is lost in the modern translation is the Hebrew way of thought, and without this there can be no successful translation. There is, I suppose, room for disagreement here. The New English Bible translators would presumably argue that the Authorized Version’s rendering of Ecclesiastes 11:1 was, although literal, misleading:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Their case would be that in English the Hebrew idiom sounded too much like wilful waste when, in fact, it represented good economic practice—hence their export or die rendering:

Send your grain across the seas, and in time you will get a return.

But more typical is the kind of small but revealing change made to Job 21:26. Here Job has just described two types of men: one dies ‘in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet’, the other dies in ‘the bitterness of his soul’. But really there is no distinction between them:

They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.

Those were the Authorized Version’s words. The New English Bible also emphasizes their identity—more so than the Authorized Version because it renders the Hebrew word yachad (AV ‘alike’) as ‘side by side’:

Side by side they are laid in earth

and worms are the shroud of both.

It is not ‘side by side’, nor ‘shroud’ (the Hebrew has tɘchaseh, ‘will cover’) which interests me so much as the transformation of the active verb into the passive: ‘they shall lie down’ becomes ‘they are laid’. Of course the New English Bible is logically right. Corpses do not go and lay themselves down, but poetically it has missed the point which the Authorized Version’s literal rendering had made—that the sudden will to die is as much the province of the vigorous and confident as it is of the weak and embittered.

This is the first paragraph of the New English Bible’s rendering of Ezekiel 33:

THESE WERE THE WORDS OF THE LORD TO ME: Man, say to your fellow-countrymen, When I set armies in motion against a land, its people choose one of themselves to be a watchman. When he sees the enemy approaching and blows his trumpet to warn the people, then if anyone does not heed the warning and is overtaken by the enemy, he is responsible for his own fate. He is responsible because, when he heard the alarm, he paid no heed to it; if he had heeded it, he would have escaped. But if the watchman does not blow his trumpet or warn the people when he sees the enemy approaching, then any man who is killed is caught with all his sins upon him; but I will hold the watchman answerable for his death.

This covers only six verses, but in those six verses there are numerous important deviations from the original Hebrew, so that what in the Authorized Version is a powerful prophetic warning becomes, here, something more like a civil defence handout. These are some of them: ‘man’ and ‘fellow-countrymen’ in verse 2 the Authorized Version renders literally as ‘son of man’ and ‘the children of thy people’. The New English Bible is doubtless right in its assumption of what the Hebrew idioms mean, but in the case of ‘man’ it could hardly be said to have found a modern idiomatic equivalent—’you’ would fit the bill much better. But more important is the loss of the mentality behind the Hebrew idioms where ‘son’ and ‘child’ embody both kinship and dependence.

Later in the same verse ‘when I set armies in motion against’ is the translators’ strange idea of a modern idiomatic equivalent for a Hebrew which the Authorized Version translates literally as ‘when I bring the sword upon the land’. The sword is the key image of the passage. The Authorized Version follows the Hebrew in repeating it in verse 3, ‘if when he seeth the sword come’; in verse 4, ‘if the sword come, and take him away’; and in verse 6, ‘if the sword come, and take away any person from among them’. All of these are demetaphorized to ‘enemy’ by the New English Bible: ‘the enemy approaching’ in verses 3 and 6, and ‘overtaken by the enemy’ in verse 4. In verse 4, too, there is a syntactic simplification of the Hebrew. The New English Bible says, simply, ‘if anyone does not heed the warning’, but the Hebrew makes a distinction between the two actions, first hearing and then not heeding—as in the Authorized Version’s ‘then whosoever heareth … and taketh not warning ...’ Its syntax may not be as concise as the New English Bible’s, but there is no virtue in making prophetic utterance concise.

The New English Bible ends the verse with a characteristic replacement of idiom: compare its ‘he is responsible for his own fate’ with the Authorized Version’s literal ‘his blood shall be upon his own head’. It is not just that the original idiom does not need to be replaced but that the New English Bible has completely lost the linking of ‘sword’ and ‘blood’ in this verse and the next.

In verse 5 the New English Bible rearranges the syntax so that the impression given is of a defensive, self-justifying God:

He is responsible because, when he heard the alarm, he paid no heed to it.

But the Hebrew is more assertive and aggressive, as is the Authorized Version’s rendering which follows the Hebrew word order:

He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning: his blood shall be upon him.

Verse 6, too, shows the modern translators’ mistrust of Hebrew syntax. Their rendering presents simple and characterless cause and effect:

But if the watchman does not blow his trumpet or warn the people when he sees the enemy approaching, then any man who is killed is caught with all his sins upon him.

The Hebrew, though, is more interesting than this because it recreates the whole narrative so far, of a watchman who sees, fails to warn, and the massacre which follows. The Authorized Version again keeps to the Hebrew word order and gets much closer to this effect:

But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity.

One might add, too, that the New English Bible’s ‘with all his sins upon him’ seems to be one Hebraism which it has retained, even at the risk of employing an archaism. But this is not so. The Hebrew has only the one word, translated accurately by the Authorized Version’s ‘in his iniquity’. What do we make of translators who impose that kind of archaism where it does not exist in the original but who, in the next verse, replace the graphic (and literal) ‘his blood will I require’ with ‘I will hold … answerable for his death’?

Not straitening the Holy Ghost was the expression used by the Rheims translators and it applies well to the whole English tradition culminating in the Authorized Version. Those translators—Tyndale, Coverdale, the Geneva and Rheims translators—cultivated ambiguity and evocative vagueness. Their modern successors invariably move towards one fixed and unreverberative meaning. Take two examples from early in Genesis. In 2:24 Adam follows his identification of woman with a statement about the overriding importance of marriage. In the words of the New English Bible he says:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and the two become one flesh.

‘Is united’ implies that the Hebrew verb in question here is connected with the word ’achad, ‘one’—but it actually translates dābaq, a verb whose primary sense is ‘to cling’ or ‘to stick’. It is, for example, the verb used in Deuteronomy 13:18, where God orders that not one thing of the city of Belial will stick to the Israelites’ hands after they have burnt it down; and in Lamentations 4:4 God’s curse is that the tongue of the sucking child will stick to the roof of its mouth because of thirst. Adam, therefore, is saying something stronger than that man and woman will unite—by using that verb the New English Bible limits the becoming one flesh to the act of sexual intercourse—he is describing a clinging and sticking together, hence the Authorized Version’s rendering:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

‘Cleave’ is a powerfully evocative verb. It carries all of the abstract sense of the two making one, but it insists too upon a concrete joining. Woman has just been created by a cleaving—in the word’s other sense—of a rib from Adam’s body. The circle is completed in this verse when the body is made whole again. The New English Bible’s ‘united’ makes the ‘one flesh’ at the end the figurative consequence of the sexual union; but the Authorized Version’s ‘cleave’ carries images of clinging, clutching, and separation from the rest of humanity.

There is a further point of importance in connection with ‘cleave’ and this is consistency of translation. In the other two examples I gave of the Hebrew word’s occurrence the Authorized Version also uses ‘cleave’: in Deuteronomy, ‘and there shall cleave nought of the cursed thing to thine hand’, and in Lamentations, ‘the tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of its mouth’. No reader of the New English Bible could begin to guess that in these three instances the same Hebrew word was used: in Deuteronomy it is translated as ‘found in thy possession’, and in Lamentations it is, unexpectedly, ‘cleaves to its palate’.

Part of my complaint is, I suppose, the old puritan hankering to be able to compare text with text and make the comparisons stick—the kind of thing the Authorized Version preface warns against. But, crucially, in examples like this it is the Authorized Version which stands for consistency. There are, for example, four more places where the Old Testament uses the image of the tongue sticking to the roof of the mouth or the jaws. The Authorized Version translates them like this:

The nobles held their peace, and their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth (Job 29:10).

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth (Ps. 137:6).

And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb (Ezek. 3:26).

My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws (Ps. 22:15).

The New English Bible’s renderings of these four are, respectively: ‘every man held his tongue’; ‘let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth’; ‘I will fasten your tongue to the roof of your mouth’; ‘my tongue sticks to my jaw’. Worse than such inconsistency is its corollary. Once the translator allows himself to pick and choose among English equivalents, then he will almost always choose too specific a word, so that expressiveness is sacrificed to an unnecessary precision. Compare these further renderings of dābaq in the two versions:

2 Samuel 23:10, describing one of David’s mighty men, the model for Bunyan’s Valiant-for-Truth:

AV:He arose, and smote the Philistines until his hand was weary, and his hand clave unto the sword.

NEB: … his hand stuck fast to his sword

Here ‘stuck fast’ is too gluey—perhaps the translators are thinking of the stickiness of blood. ‘Clave’ gives the hand more of its own identity, and the sword becomes a prop to support it in its tiredness. Psalm 44:26:

AV:For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth.

NEB:For we sink down to the dust and lie prone on the earth.

Having decided to ignore the Hebrew word nepesh, ‘soul’, in the first half of the verse, the New English Bible becomes highly specific in the second—‘prone’, of course, not ‘supine’. Entirely lost is the grand poetic contrast of a soul bowed down and a belly cleaving, i.e. a soul forced to act against its will and a belly all too ready to embrace the earth.

Genesis 34:3, Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped by Shechem. This verse describes Shechem’s feelings immediately after the rape:

AV:And his soul clave unto Dinah … and he loved the damsel.

NEB:But he remained true to Dinah … he loved the girl.

‘Remained true’ is exactly the wrong phrase since it implies fidelity and honour: the point of the story is that Shechem’s lust is not fulfilled by one act of rape. He keeps possession of Dinah until he and his men are massacred. The Authorized Version’s image of his soul cleaving to her—the Hebrew again has nepesh as the subject of the verb—conveys much better the intensity of Shechem’s feelings which led him to do such a mad act.

By rewriting the original and reinterpreting it in the terms of modern idiom the New English Bible misses crucial ambiguities and contrasts which Renaissance English Bibles had retained. My second example from Genesis 4:1 illustrates this: it is Eve’s reaction to the birth of her first son, Cain. Here the New English Bible has her saying, ‘With the help of the Lord I have brought a man into being.’ But the Hebrew is more direct. It uses the verb qāneh, and the sense of this is not to bring into being, but to acquire—even, to buy, for nouns like miqneh, ‘cattle’, and miqnāh, ‘purchase’ are derived from it. Cain is a possession acquired with the aid of, or, and the Hebrew will allow this, from the Lord—as in the Authorized Version’s rendering: ‘I have gotten a man from the Lord.’ And ‘gotten’ is a brilliant translation of Tyndale’s (showing, incidentally, the value of first thoughts: in his 1534 version he changed it to ‘obtained’) which the Authorized Version did well to keep. It unites acquiring something with begetting it.

Eve’s reaction to Abel’s birth is not described, but after Abel’s death she has a third son, Seth, and at his birth she uses a significantly different form of words from those she used at the birth of Cain. It would be difficult, though, to see what kind of contrast there was if we had to depend on the New English Bible. It has Eve saying:

God has granted me another son in place of Abel.

The Authorized Version is more literal:

God … hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel.

In the New English Bible the contrasts are between bringing into being and being granted, and between ‘man’ and ‘son’. In the Authorized Version they are between ‘getting’ and ‘being appointed’, and between ‘man’ and ‘seed’—a more effective revelation of what Abel’s murder has taught her about the ownership of children and about death and continuity.

The modern translator’s scholarly desire to be specific will inevitably make the Bible’s most poetic passages prosaic. In Genesis 6:13 God’s resounding warning to Noah, in the words of the Authorized Version, ‘the end of all flesh is come before me’, becomes in the New English Bible, ‘the loathsomeness of all mankind has become plain to me’. Three pieces of scholarship have helped turn God from an awesome figure into a bureaucrat. The Hebrew word qēts, a common word meaning ‘end’ and one which often has eschatological implications, is clearly not specific enough—hence ‘loathsomeness’, which is based, one guesses, on a conjectured emendation. Then the word bāsār, normally used in the Bible to mean ‘flesh’, is narrowed down to mankind—but why this should be I find difficult to understand, since the flood destroyed all creatures as well as man. And, finally, the Hebrew bā’ lɘpānai, ‘has-come before-me’, has lost the Hebraic vagueness which the Authorized Version had retained, and has been made plain for the modern reader to understand.

The verb mātaq means, essentially, ‘to be sweet’. It occurs three times in Job, and twice the New English Bible gives it its essential meaning: in 21:33 ‘the dust of the earth is sweet to him’, and in 20:12 ‘though evil taste sweet in his mouth’. But its most evocative use is in 24:20, and because it is so evocative, the modern scholars choose to emend it—hence the huge difference between the New English Bible’s ‘the worm sucks him dry’ and the Authorized Version’s ‘the worm shall feed sweetly on him’.

One of the lessons which the Renaissance translators taught, but which the modern translators do not care to learn, is that the most literal rendering is often the most powerful. Take the Hebrew construct form, its chief way of expressing genitival or adjectival relationships. So natural and simple is it to use a noun+‘of’+noun form to render it into English—largely because it preserves the Hebrew word order—that it is difficult to understand why the modern translators avoid it, unless it be from fear of the ambiguities it encourages. In Psalm 127:2 the man who works without the Lord’s help is described as one who, in the words of the Authorized Version, is ‘to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows’. In the New English Bible he is addressed as one who will ‘go late to rest, toiling for the bread you eat’. An even greater loss in a similar construct phrase comes in Proverbs 20:17, where the New English Bible teaches us not to eat stolen food:

Bread got by fraud tastes good,

but afterwards it fills the mouth with grit.

But how much more telling is the Authorized Version’s recreation of the construct to blur together lying and stealing, literal food and figurative words:

Bread of deceit is sweet to a man: but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel.

And not the least part of the effect is due to the Authorized Version’s grammatical literalness: the Hebrew verb here is a passive form of mālā’, ‘to fill’.

This verb gives a useful final illustration of the virtues of translating as literally as possible. In Jeremiah 46:12 the New English Bible gives the prophet’s premonition like this:

The nations have heard your cry

and the earth echoes with your screams.

But ‘echoes with’ is too sophisticated for a Hebrew which uses the more basic verb mālā’. In contrast the Authorized Version’s literalness recreates not only the image of echoing