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King James Bible |
To further reconcile Protestants and Catholics under an Anglican church, King James I commissioned forty-seven scholars to go back to the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts and create a new translation of the Bible, suitable for all and independent of Roman influence. The result was both the finest flower of the Elizabethan renaissance and a fertile new foundation for the language.
The style was simple. With only 8,000 different words and the concrete images and idioms of their Hebrew heritage, these were stories everyone could understand inology, a pernguage as homely as their lives. The “writing was on the wall”, there was “new wine in old bottles”, you escaped by the “skin of your teeth”. There were no classical allusions, no fancy sentences, no complex abstractions.
And the rhythms were strong, made to be remembered. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne had prepared the ground for a new literature with a cadence as musical and proud as anything Homer could have imagined provided a rich exemplar of the written word that everyone could turn to. For a thousand years, English had been toppled in turn by Saxon, Latin, German, and French. Many distinct dialects were scattered across the little country, and what you spoke depended on where you lived. Now, at the dawn of printing, the King James translation brought standardized spelling, syntax, and symbolism, a touchstone for centuries of future literature.
To Everything There is a Season
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |