happy birthday kjv

In a flat white box surrounded by acid-free paper, I have a single page from the first edition of the King James Bible. It was a gift from my parents (they know me well). That piece of paper turns 400 years old today.

The 1611 Bible is not just one of the great achievements of the English language; it's one of England's great gifts to the world. Building on the achievements of Wycliffe and Tyndale and Coverdale and the Great Bible, the Bishop's Bible, and the Geneva Bible, but significantly different from them at key points, the KJV still reigns supreme. It shapes our language still. Hundreds upon hundreds of translations later, we still go to King James for the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer.

It'll be worth your time to find and read Adam Nicolson's engaging book God's Secretaries. Nicolson is one of those historians who has become so familiar with the time he's studying that he can see implied statements and pull out their entire meaning for us who are so removed from Jacobean society.

Here's a passage in which he discusses the various rules by which the translators will operate. Each rule comes under close scrutiny, with miraculously revealing results.

[rule 6:] Noe marginal notes att all to be affixed, but only for ye explanation of ye Hebrew or Greeke Words, which cannot without some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.

There were to be no marginal notes 'att all', not even those which might conform to the ideology of the established Jacobean church. The text, as all good Protestants might require, was to be presented clean and sufficient of itself, except where the actual words of the original were so opaque that a 'circumlocution' might not explain them within the text. 'Circumlocution' did not mean then quite what it means now. Thomas Wilson in The arte of rhetorique, published in 1553 and in use throughout the sixteenth century, had described circumlocution as 'a large description either to sett forth a thyng more gorgeouslie, or else to hyde it'. The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different meanings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extraordinarily freighted, with a richness which few other texts have ever equalled. Again and again, the Jacobean Translators chose a word not for its clarified straightforwardness (which had been Tyndale's focus in the 1520s and '30s, and the Geneva Calvinists' in the 1550s) but for its richness, its suggestiveness, its harmonic resonances. That is the heart of the irenicon: divergence held within a singularity, James's Arcadian vision made word.

What an achievement. Today I'll get that piece of paper out, marvel that it's lasted, only slightly discolored and splotched, for four hundred years, and marvel at the mighty words it contains.