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
The fourth fact which helped to determine its
English style is the loyalty of the translators to
the original, notably the Hebrew. It is a common
remark of the students of the original
tongues that the Hebrew and Greek languages
are peculiarly translatable. That is notable in
the Hebrew. It is not a language of abstract
terms. The tendency of language is always to
become vague, since we are lazy in the use of it.
We use one word in various ways, and a pet one
for many ideas. Language is always more concrete
in its earlier forms. In this period of the
concrete English language, then, the translation
was made from the Hebrew, which was also a
concrete, figurative language itself. The structure
of the Hebrew sentence is very simple.
There are no extended paragraphs in it. It is
somewhat different in the New Testament,
where these paragraphs are found, certainly in
the Pauline Greek; but even there the extended
sentences are broken into clauses which can be
taken as wholes. The English version shows
constantly the marks of the Hebrew influence in
the simplicity of its phrasing. Renan says that
the Hebrew "knows how to make propositions,
but not how to link them into paragraphs." So
the earlier Bible stories are like a child's way of
talking. They let one sentence follow another,
and their unity is found in the overflowing use
of the word "and"--one fact hung to another
to make a story, but not to make an argument.
In the first ten chapters of I Samuel, for example,
there are two hundred and thirty-eight verses;
one hundred and sixty of them begin with AND.
There are only twenty-six of the whole which
have no connective word that thrusts them back
upon the preceding verse.
In the Hebrew language, also, most of the
emotions are connected either in the word used
or in the words accompanying it with the physical
condition that expresses it. Over and over
we are told that "he opened his mouth and
said," or, "he was angry and his countenance
fell." Anger is expressed in words which tell
of hard breathing, of heat, of boiling tumult, of
trembling. We would not trouble to say that.
The opening of the mouth to speak or the falling
of the countenance in anger, we would take
for granted. The Hebrew does not. Even in
the description of God you remember the terms
are those of common life; He is a shepherd when
shepherds are writing; He is a husbandman
threshing out the nations, treading the wine-
press until He is reddened with the wine--and
so on. That is the natural method of the Hebrew
language--concrete, vivid, never abstract,
simple in its phrasing. The King James translators
are exceedingly loyal to that original.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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