The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
History
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
Illustrate it by imagining that in American
literature the name Lincoln gathered to itself
such sacredness that it was never pronounced
and only its consonants were ever printed. Suppose
that whenever readers came to it they
simply said Washington, thinking Lincoln all
the while. Then think of the displacement of
the vowels of Lincoln by the vowels of Washington.
You have a word that looks like Lancilon
or Lanicoln; but a reader would never
pronounce so strange a word. He would always
say Washington, yet he would always think the
other meaning. And while he would retain the
meaning in some degree, he would soon forget
the original word, retaining only his awe of it.
Which is just what happened with the divine
name. The Hebrews knew it was not Lord, yet
they always said Lord when they came to the
four letters that stood for the sacred word.
The word Jehovah, made up of the consonants
of an unknown word and the vowels of a familiar
word, is in itself meaningless. Scholarship
is not yet sure what was the original meaning
of the sacred name with its four consonants.
These translators had to face that problem.
It was a peculiar problem at that time. How
should they put into English the august name of
God when they did not know what the true
vowels were? There was dispute among scholars.
They did not take sides as our later American
Revision has done, some of us think quite unwisely.
They chose to retain the Hebrew usage,
and print the divine name in unmistakable type
so that its personal meaning could not be mistaken.
On the other hand, disputes since their day
have shown how they translated when transliteration
would have been wiser. Illustrate with
one instance. There is a Hebrew word, Sheol,
with a Greek word, Hades, which corresponds to
it. Usage had adopted the Anglo-Saxon word
Hell as the equivalent of both of these words,
so they translated Sheol and Hades with the
English word Hell. The only question that had
been raised was by that Hugh Broughton of
whom we were speaking a moment ago, and it
had not seemed a serious one. Certainly the
three terms have much in common, and there
are places where both the original words seemed
to be virtually equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon
Hell, but they are not the same. The Revised
Version of our own time returned to the original,
and instead of translating those words whose
meaning can be debated, it transliterated them
and brought the Hebrew word Sheol and the
Greek word Hades over into English. That,
of course, gave a chance for paragraphers to say
that the Revised Version had read Hell out of
the Scriptures. All that happened was that
cognizance was taken of a dispute which would
have guided the King James translators if it
had existed in their time, and we should not
have become familiar with the Anglo-Saxon
word Hell as the translation of those disputed
Hebrew and Greek words.
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