In this excerpt from Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew language and literature at the University of California Berkeley, reflects on the literary and cultural significance of the King James Bible, which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year. In England, the Protestant Reformation took an important step toward its consolidation in 1611 when the Bible was made fully accessible to the reading public in a translation that rapidly became canonical. The King James Version was famously eloquent and a beautiful instrument for conveying the vision […]
