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By Root 1095 0

Calvary was more properly called The Skull, that “the children of Israel” is less accurate than “the people of Israel” and that these children, or people, refrained from putting their new wine into old wineskins and not old bottles, that the Old Testament desert actually blossomed not like a rose but like a crocus, that Job really put the price of wisdom above pearls and not above rubies, that the silver cord was “snapped” rather than “loosed,” that the widow gave not her “mites” but “two copper coins,” that the writing on Belshazzar’s wall was not “Mene mene tekel upharsin” but “Mene mene tekel and parsin,” that the Psalmist saw the wicked man “towering like a cedar” instead of “spreading himself like a green bay tree,” that Adam was not “of the earth, earthy” but “from the earth, a man of dust,” and that “my cup overflows” and “by the mouth of babes and infants” are more up-to-date locutions than “my cup runneth over” and “out of the mouth of babes and sucklings”—granting all this, it is still doubtful that such trivial gains in accuracy are not outweighed by the loss of such long-cherished beauty of phrasing. Might not the Revisers have left well enough, and indeed a good deal better than well enough, alone?

Other doubts swarm. I can’t understand why “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” had to be changed to “was moving over the face of the waters” or why the Nineteenth Psalm had to be altered from “The heavens declare the glory of God” to “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” I don’t know why “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13) had to become “there men will weep and gnash their teeth” or why Paul’s magnificent eloquence (in K.J.V., at least) has to be hamstrung by pettifogging and needless alterations. For example, in I Corinthians 13:1, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal” is mutilated to “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” and in Ephesians 6:12, the familiar grandeur of “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” is revised to “For we are not contending against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Substituting “noisy gong” for “sounding brass” and the weak, abstract “contending” for the vivid “wrestle” seems to me malicious mischief, if not assault and battery.

They have even rewritten the Lord’s Prayer. “As we forgive our debtors” is changed to “as we also have forgiven our debtors,” a bit of lint-picking that might have been forgone in the interest of tradition—and euphony. “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen” is omitted (though given in a footnote) because they believe it a corruption of the original text. But, after all, the fact that Bernini’s colonnades were not part of the original plan of St. Peter’s is hardly a reason for doing away with them. Some of the manuscripts discovered in that Dead Sea cave may turn out to differ importantly from what has been known for the last thousand years as “The Bible.” Maybe the Ten Commandments are a late interpolation. But if they are, I should think that even the Revisers would hesitate to omit them.

The raison d’être of R.S.V., however, is not scholarly but stylistic; to produce a more “readable” Bible. This being an age much more matter-of-fact than the seventeenth century—or the first century, for that matter—an age more used to skimming rapidly over a large quantity of journalistic prose than to dwelling intensively on a few poetic works, to make the Bible “readable” means to have it “make sense” to a reader who wants to know simply What’s It All About. Poetic intensity or prophetic exhaltation interferes with this easy, rapid assimilation partly because such language is idiosyncratic and partly because it strikes