Happy Birthday, KJV!

This, stolen with gratitude, from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac …

It was on this day in 1611 that the first edition of the King James Bible was published in England. It is one of the greatest and most influential works in the English language, even though it was translated by a committee.

It was produced during a particularly chaotic period for England. An epidemic of the black plague had struck London so severely that the year before work began on the King James Bible, 30,000 Londoners had died of the disease. At the same time, Puritans in the country were beginning to agitate against the monarchy as a form of government. And a group of underground Catholics were plotting to assassinate the king.

King James I thought that a new translation of the Bible might help hold the country together. There had been several English translations of the Bible already, but King James wanted a Bible that would become the definitive version. Previous versions had been translated from Latin. King James wanted his Bible to be more accurate to the original Hebrew and Greek. King James also decided that his Bible should have as few explanatory notes as possible, so that it would appeal to the widest audience.

James assembled a committee of 54 of the best linguists in the country. They believed that the most important quality of the translation would be that it sound right, since it would be read aloud in churches. So when the committee would gather, each man read his verses aloud, to be judged and revised by the other men.

The translators also deliberately used old-fashioned language. At the time they were working on the Bible, words like “thou” and “sayeth” had already gone out of fashion. Some scholars believe that the translators wanted to give the sense that the language in the Bible came from long ago and far away.

The first edition came out on this day in 1611, but for decades, most people preferred the Puritan Geneva Bible, because of its plainer language. It was only after England went through a civil war that the King James Bible came into fashion. It went on to influence the way writers have used the English language for hundreds of years.

Pic Source