The Bible : Authorized King James Version

2410 Pages·2008·3.71 MB·English

by  Carroll

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Introduction © 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 220.5′2043—dc20 96–28858
ISBN 978–0–19–953594–1
4
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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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
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE BIBLE
R C was Professor of Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies at the University of
OBERT ARROLL
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).
S P is Margaret Root Brown Professor of Victorian Studies and Director of
TEPHEN RICKETT
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).
CONTENTS
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Select Bibliography
THE BIBLE
The Translators to the Reader
The Epistle Dedicatory
List of Books of the Bible
THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE APOCRYPHA
THE NEW TESTAMENT
Explanatory Notes
Glossary to the Notes
Maps
PREFACE
B are, by their very nature, partisan. As that plural suggests, there are many bibles,
IBLES
even in English, and each is the product of a particular interest group—whether
religious, commercial, or, increasingly 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
version 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 general 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
written 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, 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 descriptions, 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 celebration 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 of
that ever-changing relationship between the Book, and other books—suggesting,
wherever 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 cultural 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 literary tradition. Among others,
Dante, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann, for instance, are too important to be omitted. In
celebrating the enduring vitality, dynamism and influence of one 400-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 continuing 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
continually shall it be in transformed worlds and words to come. This edition is but one
version of that ongoing word.
R C
OBERT ARROLL
S P
TEPHEN RICKETT
University of Glasgow 1996