The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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