i'm reading a fascinating book on the making of the king james bible.

the author, adam 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.

in one place, he discusses the various rules by which the translators
will operate. each rule comes under close scrutiny, with miraculously
revealing results.

his overall view is that not only is the kjv the greatest translation
(not the most accurate or most current but the greatest) of the bible,
but it is also the greatest thing ever written in english, period. and
on top of that, he considers it england's greatest accomplishment, of
any kind, in that age. a tall thesis, but he defends it so well that
i'm now inclined to agree. definitely some absorbing reading to pick
up.

--

barry
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[asterisks signify italics]


The Bible was to become part of the new royal ideology. Elizabeth had
portrayed herself as a Protestant champion against the powers of Rome
and Spain. That was now out of date. James, *Rex Pacifus*, was to make
the Bible part of the large-scale redefinition of England. It had the
potential to become, in the beautiful phrase of the time, an
"*irenicon*", a thing of peace, a means by which the divisions of the
church, and of the country as a whole, could be encompassed in one
unifying fabric founded on the divine authority of the king.

---

[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.