In Their Own Words

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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 of the Biblical writers to the English-speaking populace. Its distinctive style would in the case of many major writers, beginning as early as the 17th century, give literary English a new and memorable coloration. (The fact that it is often inaccurate, and that the eloquence is not entirely so unflagging as most readers remember, scarcely diminishes this broad impact.)

But it was in America that the potential of the 1611 translation to determine the foundational language and symbolic imagery of a whole culture was most fully realized … To the American novelists from the 19th century to the 21st, the language of the Old Testament in its 1611 English version continued to suffuse the culture even when the fervid faith in Scripture as revelation had begun to fade …

The fourth centennial of the 1611 translation stands on the horizon. A great deal has changed in American culture since the third centennial was celebrated in 1911. At that juncture, the King James Version was extolled by leading public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as America’s national book and as the text that more than any other had affected the life of English-speaking peoples. My guess is that the 2011 milestone will be marked more in academic circles than in the public domain.

In the century since the previous centennial was celebrated, two major shifts have taken place: The practice of reading the Bible aloud, of reading the Bible at all, and of memorizing passages from the Bible has drastically diminished; and the King James Bible has ceased to be the almost universally used translation as readers have been encouraged to use more “accessible” versions, which also happen to be stylistically inferior in virtually all respects …

At least for two centuries, the King James Version of the Bible helped foster a general responsiveness to the expressive, dignified use of language, to the ways in which the rhythms and diction of a certain kind of English could move readers … English-speaking culture has been marked with a certain difference from other Western cultures because it has inherited a strongly eloquent canonical translation of the Bible that has to a palpable degree reshaped the language …

Let us end by going back to the beginning as it is rendered in the King James Version: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” This is, of course, by no means a scientific account of the origins of the world, but it is a strong statement, cast in the stately paratactic cadences of the Priestly writer that are nicely echoed by the 1611 translators, about the nature of reality: all is harmonious; being emerges as a sequence of distinct oppositions firmly divided by the Creator and aptly mirrored textually in the balanced progression of parallel clauses. It is a grand, simple style that a good writer might be tempted to embrace or at least somehow cite.

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 […]