The Whole Extent

Not yet online, Dot Wordsworth of The Spectator writes:

Now that we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible, I wonder if we can dispense with the notion that it has greatly influenced the shape of the English language. Macaulay once claimed that if every other book perished, the Bible ‘would alone suffice to show the whole extent’ of the beauty and power of English. But, as Gordon Campbell points out in his admirable new book Bible (Oxford, £16.99), one of the glories of Macaulay’s own style, the subordinate clause, is no feature of the Bible in the translation made in King James’s reign.

It follows the paratactic structure of Hebrew, with sentences piled up successively instead of involuted clauses, and this rather suits English. That is one of the reasons we find the language of the AV poetic. Another is its archaism. We like it when we hear holpen, marishes, kine and canker-worm.

Despite its restricted vocabulary, the Authorised Version is often hard to understand. In 1759, a parson called Matthew Pilkington wrote a book complaining of its obscurities, citing Ezekiel 13:18: ‘Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls.’ What can it mean? The problem stems mostly from the obscurity of the practices described. To make it clear, some kind of explanatory amplification is needed, and this the AV refuse to provide. By comparison, the Bible in Spanish (a latecomer among vernacular versions) speaks of women who tejen ligaduras mágicas — weave magic bands to bind people’s hands.

If we spoke as the AV spake, our speech would be poetic but difficult to understand. To be sure we speak the same language, the language of great poets like the unread Langland. But if we seek phrases that have passed from the Bible to become idioms in the English language — such as ‘salt of the earth’ or ‘from strength to strength’ — they number not thousands as some have asserted, but no more than 257, as the painstaking work of David Crystal has established in another book published by Oxford, Begat (£14.99).

I find that most educated people under 60 that I meet have scarcely read the Bible. They’d find it interesting, but not as a key to the modern English language.

Again I say that if you want to make a case for it, then you have to make a theological one. They do in America, in Northern Ireland, and on the ultraconservative fringes of English, Scottish and Welsh Calvinism. I may not agree with them. But at least I can respect them.