• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1002 0

broke the fangs of the unrighteous” (Job 29:17), in each case a more archaic word being put in place of a modern (but homely) one. In K.J.V. sin “lieth” at the door, but it is “couching” in R.S.V.; the blind “see” and the hungry “are filled” in K.J.V., but in R.S.V. they “receive their sight” and “are satisfied;” K.J.V. renders I Samuel 4:22: “The glory is departed from Israel, for the ark of God is taken,” but this is too stark for R.S.V., which changes it to “the ark of God has been captured.” Often the Revisers inflate the simplicity and understatement of K.J.V. into prose resembling cotton candy. The lovely phrase in Ecclesiastes 12:5, “Man goeth to his long home,” with its somber, long-drawn-out “o”s, is Spelled Out into “Man goes to his eternal home,” which sounds like a mortician’s ad. K.J.V. often uses concrete action words to metaphorically suggest an abstract meaning, but R.S.V. prefers less vivid abstractions. In her perceptive article in the Ladies’ Home Journal on the two versions, Dorothy Thompson gave a perfect example of this. Psalms 42:1 reads, in K.J.V., “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.” R.S.V. makes it “As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for Thee, O God!” As Miss Thompson remarked, a hart pants but does not long, or if he does, he can, being inarticulate, express his emotions only in some action like panting. The passionate vigor of K.J.V. depends on the hart’s being an animal, not a sentimental human being in a deerskin. If, however, there is a chance for a good, safe cliché—another method of making the Bible more “readable”—R.S.V. reverses this process; “When he thought thereon, he wept” becomes “He broke down and wept,” “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity” becomes “In my vain life I have seen everything,” and “They were pricked in their heart” becomes “They were cut to the heart.”

R.S.V. has also departed from simplicity in certain matters of “taste,” mostly involving sex. If only to avoid adolescent giggles in church, some Elizabethan terms must be avoided in this degenerate and refined age—as in I Samuel 25:22, in which the expression “any that pisseth against the wall” is discreetly omitted—but Nice Nellie is altogether too prominent. Thus “whore” is rendered “harlot,” although the former term is still current while the latter is archaic (but, for that very reason, Nicer). Thus the wise and the foolish virgins have become “maidens”—which is more archaic and less sexy—costing us, incidentally, still another familiar expression. “My bowels boiled” is now, “My heart is in turmoil,” “sore boils” are “loathsome sores,” “dung hill” is “ash heap.” The Revisers even fear “belly.” “Fill his belly with the east wind” becomes “fill himself” and Psalms 22:10 is changed from “I was cast upon Thee from the womb; Thou art my God from my mother’s belly” to “Upon Thee was I cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me Thou hast been my God,” which is also a good example of Spelling It Out. “‘Belly,’” says H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage, “is a good word now almost done to death by genteelism.”

“The King James Bible,” write the Revisers, apropos the failure of the 1885 and the 1901 revisions to replace it, “has still continued to hold its place upon the lecterns of the majority of churches....Congregations have gone on loving it best because it seemed to them incomparably beautiful.” One wonders how they could think their version preserves this beauty. K.J.V.’s “dignity and profundity,” they go on, “are the result of the utmost clarity, directness, and simplicity. These qualities have been earnestly sought in R.S.V.” But K.J.V. also has very different qualities—strange, wild, romantic, complex turns of style, since Elizabethan English was as much in the rococo as in the classic mode. This is especially true of the Old Testament. Clarity, directness, and simplicity are hardly an adequate definition of the qualities of poetry. Milton’s “simple, sensuous, and passionate” is more adequate; R.S.V. usually achieves the first, rarely