The Bible : Authorized King James Version

1825 Pages·2008·104.4 MB·English

by  Robert Carroll

OXFORD WORLD S CLASSICS
THE BIBLE
ROBERT CARROLL was Professor of Hebrew Bible and Semitic
Studies at the University of Glasgow. Among his many publications
are When Prophecy Failed (1979), From Chaos to Covenant (1981),
Jeremiah: A Commentary (1986), and Wolf in the Sheepfold (1991).
STEPHEN PRICKET T is Margaret Root Brown Professor of
Victorian Studies and Director of the Armstrong-Browning Library
at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Previous appointments include
the Chair of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, the
Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra,
and teaching posts at the Universities of Sussex, Minnesota, and
Smith College, Massachusetts. His other books on literature and
theology include Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of
Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976), Words and
the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986), (ed.),
Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (1991), and
Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996).
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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
The Bible
Authorized King James Version
With an Introduction and Notes by
ROBERT CARROLL
and
STEPHEN PRICKETT
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
COCFORD
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Introduction 13 Stephen Prickett 1997
Select Bibliography, Notes, Glossary © Robert Carroll 1997
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First published as a World's Classics paperback 1997
Reissued as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 1998
Reissued 2008
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bible, English. Authorized. 1997.
The Bible : Authorized King James Version / edited with an
introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett.
p. cm.—(Oxford world's classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Carroll, Robert P. II. Prickett, Stephen. III. Title. IV. Series.
BS185 1997.094 1997 22().5'2043—dc20 96-28858
ISBN 978-0-19-953594-1
4
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ivés pie
PREFACE
BIBLES are, by their very nature, partisan. As that plural suggests,
there are many bibles, even in English, and each is the product of a
particular interest group—whether religious, commercial, or, increas-
ingly nowadays, both. This edition is no exception. The editors of this
World's Classics version have chosen for their text the 1611, King James
translation—also more familiarly called 'the Authorized Version'—
not because of any presumed impartiality, but because historically it
has had greater influence on the development of the cultures and
literatures of the English-speaking world than any other translation of
the Bible.1 As the Introduction should make clear, however, that ver-
sion itself represents not merely a particular historical compromise,
but has a quite specific and polemical bias of its own.
Nor can the present editors be themselves exempted from this gen-
eral rule. Though this edition, unlike almost every other on the market,
is not sponsored by a particular religious group, the mere fact that
we have chosen to use a translation that is, in places, more than four
hundred years old, indicates an initial historical bias to our approach.
Bias is not confined to the choice of text. As the Introduction, Notes,
and the rest of the critical apparatus should make very plain, we have
throughout been interested in showing not merely how this particular
translation came into being, but also how it relates to the Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin versions from which it was made. We have also writ-
ten our comments taking into account post-Enlightenment, modern,
naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic) knowledge and thinking
about the Bible. Such a modern historical approach highlights another
quality of this edition. So far from being the rock of ages in a sea of
flux, as some devout Christian readers of the Bible have maintained in
the past, it should be clear to any impartial reader of this edition that
the history of biblical interpretation is one of continuous and, at times,
quite startling change. The eighteenth-century shift from typological
to narrative reading of the scriptures, for example, represents a far more
fundamental interpretative shift than any changes that have occurred
in the production or interpretation of Shakespeare's plays over the same
period. To Jews, long used to a tradition of midrashic commentary,
1 This edition reproduces the New Pica Royal text, including the Apocrypha, printed
and published by Oxford University Press in 1966.
v
PREFACE
this fluidity comes as no surprise; to those with a stronger belief in
the stability of scripture—even that appropriated from another religion
—it may seem strange. The fact remains, however, that one reason for
the Bible's continuing attraction to a wide range of readers—to painters,
philosophers, poets, playwrights, songwriters and writers of all descrip-
tions, as well as to religious practitioners—is the amazing dynamism
of the text itself, and its continued capacity to present itself in a new
light to every generation. In an important sense, this edition is a celeb-
ration of that historical, transformative dynamic aspect of the Bible.
Interwoven with that dynamic of transformative change is the
whole cultural and literary tradition of the English-speaking peoples.
In so far as such an aim can be encompassed within a few hundred
pages of notes, we set out to show at least a little ofthat ever-changing
relationship between the Book, and other books—suggesting, wher-
ever possible, where other writers have taken their points of departure
from the Bible, and, just as important, how our view of the Bible has
been modified by other writers. If to claim that this edition is a cul-
tural history would be hubris, our intention is at least to point in that
direction. The new seventeenth-century Protestant insistence on
searching the scriptures led to both the Puritan rhetoric of the Civil
War and John Milton's Paradise Lost. The Bible has been central to
the rhetoric of Protestant and Catholic alike in Ireland and among
the Irish, from Swift and Sterne to Joyce and Beckett. We recall also
the place of the Bible in the new democracy of America, as well as
in the visionary Australian landscapes of Patrick White's Riders in the
Chariot. Nor have we confined ourselves exclusively to the English lit-
erary tradition. Among others, Dante, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann,
for instance, are too important to be omitted. In celebrating the endur-
ing vitality, dynamism and influence of one 4OO-year-old translation of
a loose and, to some extent, accidental collection of ancient writings
translated from Near Eastern texts, we are also celebrating the con-
tinuing vitality of the interlinked but marvellously diverse cultures of
the English-speaking world, and beyond. If in the beginning was the
word, then continually has that word been in the world transforming
it and being transformed by that world through other words and con-
tinually shall it be in transformed worlds and words to come. This
edition is but one version of that ongoing word.
ROBERT CARROLL
STEPHEN PRICKETT
University of Glasgow 1996
vi
CONTENTS
List of Maps viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
Select Bibliography xlvii
THE BIBLE
The Translators to the Reader lui
The Epistle Dedicatory Ixxi
List of Books of the Bible Ixxiii
THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE APOCRYPHA
THE NEW TESTAMENT
Explanatory Notes 321
Glossary to the Notes 442
Maps 447
vii
LIST OF MAPS
(at end)
1. Israel in Canaan
2. The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah
3. Palestine in Hellenistic times (and under the
Maccabees)
4. Palestine under the Herods
5. Rome and the East (including Paul's journeys)
6. Galilee in the time of Jesus
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE history of the production and reception of translations of the
Bible into English, especially the Authorized King James Version, is
long indebted to too many people for any of them to be acknow-
ledged in this note. We would, on the other hand, especially like to
thank David Weston, Principal Assistant Librarian and Deputy Keeper
of Special Collections in the Glasgow University Library, for his in-
valuable assistance with this project by his diligence in making avail-
able first editions of English Bibles from the Ewing Collection in the
Library. This Collection is a splendid resource for biblical scholar-
ship on English Bibles. Also to be thanked for making available useful
books on the subject are John Barclay and Graham Smith.
This book has been an unconscionable time in the preparation
and we would like to thank Catherine Clarke for her infinite patience,
Susie Casement for her most cheerful co-operation and constant in-
terest in the project, and also Tamsin Shelton and Judith Luna who
over time have joined the list of non-contributing editors and their
assistants. Without them all this volume would never have seen the
light of day.
The genesis of this project for one of the writers was a bus journey
from Bendorf to Worms (Rashi's place) in the company of Gabriel
Josipovici in the summer of 1991. The lengthy discussion we had on
that trip about how such a World's Classics 'Bible' might be written
and produced gave rise (in some sense) to this particular execution
of the project. So this is (for better or for worse) a form of 'Gabriel's
book', though who should be thanking whom and for what are open
questions, and whether thanks are in order at all is for readers to
judge.
ROBERT CARROLL
STEPHEN PRICKETT
January 1996
ix