Forgive me, spirit of science

Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible, which will be 400 years old next year.

By Richard Dawkins Published 29 December 2010

The King James Bible occupies nearly 42 pages of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, only narrowly beaten by Shakespeare, with 45. Not just literature in the high sense but everyday speech is laced, suffused - riddled, even - with biblical phrases the status of which ranges from telling quotation ("They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind") to cliché ("No peace for the wicked") and all points between. A word in season and perhaps we can see eye to eye. Although I wouldn't call the Bible my ewe lamb, and I would have to go the extra mile before I killed the fatted calf for it, you don't need the wisdom of Solomon to see how biblical imagery dominates our English. If my words fall on stony ground - if you pass me by as a voice crying in the wilderness - be sure your sin will find you out. Between us there is a great gulf fixed and you are a thorn in my flesh. We have come to the parting of the ways. I fear it is a sign of the times.

It has to be the King James version, of course. Modern translations break the spell as surely as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Listen
to this, if you can bear to, from the Good News Bible, whose clunking title matches its style:

It is useless, useless, said the Philosopher.
Life is useless, all useless./You spend your life working, labouring, and what do you have to show for it? Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same.

Older readers might hear the voice of Tony Hancock. Or is it Victor Meldrew? Anyway, now here's the real thing:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity./What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?/One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Real thing? Well, let me not emulate that notorious slogan against the teaching of Spanish in Texas schools: "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas." Hebrew, alas, is a sealed book to me (yes, that's another one: Isaiah 29:11), but I have it on respected authority that Ecclesiastes, at least, is pretty damn good poetry in the original. If so, it certainly doesn't make it through the Good News mangling. But I shall argue that poetry can gain in translation, and I believe this may have been achieved with the King James Bible.

It is often said (though often forgotten) that the Bible is not a book but a library. Obviously unable to cover it all, I shall attend to my two favourite books, neighbours in the Old Testament: Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. First, the world-weary Preacher's lament for the passing of youth and the privations of old age.

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.

Compare that to the Good News version:

So remember your Creator while you are still young, before those dismal days and years come when you will say, "I don't enjoy life".

“I don't enjoy life"? How are the mighty fallen! If I can't have poetry, I'd prefer the blunt frankness of a beloved godfather who died this year at the age of 93. "Richard," this tall, handsome old man said, fixing me with his blue eyes for the only piece of solemn, godfatherly advice he ever gave me, "old age is a bugger."

My theory is that translation, and even mistranslation, can sometimes enhance the poetry. Here's an example.

. . . in the day when the keepers of the house
shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because
they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,/And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low . . .

Those "grinders" have always intrigued me, and I have been especially haunted by "when the sound of the grinding is low". Some sort of ancient mill rumbled through my imagination, resonating with "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves" (no, that one's Milton, or at least via Milton). But the Good News Bible finds a more down-to-earth meaning of grinders and "those that look out of the windows". It's simply that the poor old chap had cataracts (darkened windows) and lost his teeth ("grinders" is kin to Wodehousian "snappers"), and there's a similarly anatomical come-down at the beginning of the passage, too:

Then your arms, that have protected you, will tremble, and your legs, now strong, will grow weak. Your teeth will be too few to chew your food, and your eyes too dim to see clearly.

That may be less poetic, but it has the ring of plausibility. Hebrew scholars may correct me, but I suspect that this Good News banality may be closer to the original than my much-loved 1611 flight of poetry.

Naturally, I have to come down on the side of accuracy, even at the expense of poetry. From the religious point of view, however, I can't help wondering whether accuracy of translation is desirable. If you are trying to persuade people to follow your religion, do you really want them to understand it? When the Roman Church gave up Latin, the congregations suddenly saw, with merciless clarity, exactly what it was they had been reciting all those years.

Let me not try to charm a deaf adder (Psalm 58), but did the hierarchy fully think through the implications of switching to the vernacular? And doesn't something similar apply to the Bible? Ecclesiastes is hardly religious at all, but in those books where the message is a religious one we might ask, in the nicest possible way, what there is to be accurate about. In any case, my interest is in the translated poetry, and I am suggesting that while some meaning may be lost, poetic value may paradoxically be gained in translation. Even more paradoxically, mistranslation may enhance the effect.

After Ecclesiastes, my second favourite book of the Bible is the Song of Solomon (not by Solomon, needless to say):

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over
and gone;/The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land . . .

I regret the day I first learned the real meaning of "turtle" in this lovely passage, and I am not about to shatter anybody else's illusions by exposing the mistranslation.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely./Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes./My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies./Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

I can guess the true meaning of the short verse about foxes and vines but - forgive me, spirit of science - I'm not sure that I can bear to spell it out. nd the same goes for the last sentence of the following: "Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair; thou has doves' eyes./Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green." Isn't it the unexpectedness - incongruity even - of "also our bed is green" that gives it its appeal, an appeal that in this case is more comic than poetic?

On the other hand, I admit to being curious about what the other hand is really doing at the end of this passage: "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love./His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me." If that means what I think it means, coupled with "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him", it casts into an even funnier light the charming Bowdlerism that heads the page: "The mutual love of Christ and his church".

I suspect that the poetry of those flagons and apples, too, gains in translation. And, back to my favourite book again, how about this inscrutable line: "Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days." For all I know, that is a dull cliché in the original, but the translation gives me the authentic tingling of poetic enigma. As for the following, the eight verses are so familiar I needn't complete them, and the cadences so intrinsically musical that Pete Seeger hardly needed to compose the tune:

To every thing there is a season, and a
time to every purpose under the heaven:/
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time
to plant, and a time to . . .

Let's celebrate the 400th anniversary of this astonishing piece of English literature. Warts and all - for I have not mentioned the carnage, the smiting, the vindictive, genocidally racist, jealous monster god of the Old Testament. Warts and all - for I have drawn a veil over the New Testament misogyny of Paul, the founder of Christianity, or the Pauline obscenity of every baby being born in sin, saved only by the divine scapegoat suffering on the cross because the Creator of the universe couldn't think of a better way to forgive everybody. Warts and all, let's encourage our schools to bring this precious English heritage to all our children, whatever their background, not as history, not as science and not (oh, please not) as morality. But as literature.

Richard Dawkins's "The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution" is published by Black Swan (£8.99)

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27 comments

Thu, 2012-08-09 21:44 — Gazzbar (not verified)

So much back and forth arguement here - all about the Bible. Which version is the most correct? What about errors of punctution, presentation, grammar, style, typography, translation accuracy and political bias?
Is not God bigger than all this?
The Bible is a book of power. Able to change lives, divide families and nations - or unite them depending on their attitude towards it.
Daily, people are persecuted - jailed, beaten, mocked, fined, even killed simply for possessing a book which some denounce as being meaningless.
Whilst it is not an irrelevant desire to want to know which Bible version / translation is the most correct and accurate, I think there is an even more relevant stance to take: that is, to firstly read the version that YOU think to be the best - and then live it.
Would you open your heart and humble yourself enough to allow God to speak to you through it, to allow Him to bring correction to your life through its wisdoms?
If you will do this, then He will give you revelation and understanding that many theologians do not have (despite years of work to obtain theological degrees). Hence many of them see the Bible as another in a field of religious manuscripts. They will not have that personal relationship with God that comes through the spirit of what is written in the Bible version you favour and not the particular language or the grammatical rendering of that version.
To know Christ and the power of sins forgiven and the chains of bondage broken - through Him alone. To know the ways that He has personally changed my life and the sure hope of eternal life I have in Him, that's the message I want to know - whatever version I'm reading.

Thu, 2010-12-30 12:14 — Keir

'Dawkins asks us to laud the King James bible as a great work of English literature on par with Shakespeare.'

Bizarre, eh. As if that's important, to him, or to us. Is this the next Dawkins educational project? Forget science now, let's improve the literary standards of the British? Not really. Sensible people will surely ask themselves, "Why does an atheist concern himself with a religious text? Perhaps the Good News Bible that he mocks is actually what we should be reading?"

At any rate, Dawkins agrees with American red-neck fundamentalists in this respect, who assert that evolution is 'evilution'! Such people care not a whit for beautiful language, because poetry is a frightening, foreign country to them. Even a simple metaphor like that causes them discomfort and apparent confusion.

When these literalists are presented with a translation identical with the KJV except for modernisation of verbs and pronouns, and are asked if it is acceptable, they refuse to accept it. So the true reason (or the main one) for the KJV's vociferous following, which incidentally did not exist before publication of the NIV, is the KJV's inaccessibility- not beauty, not accuracy.

William Tyndale was burned for translating the Bible out of Latin, a dead language for 99% of people. In practice, the English of the KJV is almost as understandable as Latin, to most, because it is such hard work for them. But it _appears_ to be accessible, so is beloved of those who oppose the Bible's message. If people are going to have the Bible, they say, let it be the KJV, to which they can become inured, and which will occlude the meaning of the original texts.

The Good News Bible, otoh, is a good read, for anyone. It's not a perfect translation, because there is no such thing. It's recognised as scholarly, yet may bring understanding even to scholars.

Whether they like it or not.

Thu, 2010-12-30 12:52 — Terrence Lockyer1

It is very much not the case, as RFM claims above, "that 400 years ago the KJV was the most modern (and only) English translation".

By the 15th century, partial translations inspired by Wycliffe were available in manuscript. William Tyndale's versions of the New Testament and Pentateuch were all in print by 1530, but fairly effectively suppressed. By the end of the following decade, Miles Coverdale's complete Bible was available, as were the "Thomas Matthew" version combining Tyndale's and Coverdale's work, and the so-called "Great Bible" created in response to Henry VIII's instruction for the placement of English Bibles in parish churches. The work of Protestants on the continent during the reign of Mary produced the Geneva Bible of 1560, which achieved wide popularity, but whose marginal notations caused disquiet on the part of monarchy and ecclesiastical hierarchy, and were among the motivations for the KJV. This was followed by the Bishops' Bible of 1568, and by the end of the 16th century there was also a Catholic English Bible, the Douai-Rheims translation. That is, prior to 1611 there were several widely available English translations; though none had achieved the preeminence that the KJV would enjoy in time.

The GNB (TEV) is not a very good choice for detailed study alone or alongside the source texts, as its principles favoured readability over literal accuracy. The NIV is more scholarly but also flawed for this purpose in that it omits entirely the Deuterocanonical books or Apocrypha accepted by Catholics, Anglicans, and other groups. A modern English reader seeking a reference or study version would probably be best served by the NRSV or REB: the former has the fullest set of books, but both are based on modern scholarship, and widely accepted by scholars and denominations. The RSV has similar merits, but is necessarily founded on less current textual scholarship. One should also not overlook the single-handed translations by sound linguistic scholars, such as Richmond Lattimore's version of the New Testament (1996), in which he aimed to pay particular attention to the styles of the books.

Thu, 2010-12-30 13:34 — Keir

'as its principles favoured readability over literal accuracy'

That's untrue. Like other contemporary versions, the GNB is 'dynamically equivalent', i.e. it presents the meaning of the original author as he would write it in the target language- 20th century English, in this case. Readability is a by-product. True literalism is often actually misleading, worse than useless for anyone other than a scholar, who does not bother with piffling translations anyway! There is no virtue in supposedly literal translations- they just give amateurs a ridiculous sense of superiority, and they have no idea whether what they read is true to the original- and in crucial places, it often isn't. Those versions that are reputed to be literal are usually subjected to external political influence (esp. the REB), as indeed the KJV was.

King James persecuted those who did not want his pomp and ceremony, his hierarchical view of the state. Are Dawkinsites also aligning with right wing influences?

Thu, 2010-12-30 15:09 — RFM

@Terence Lockyer. A 'small' (meaning large) oversight there, thanks for the correction and I very much agree with your assessment of the GNB.

You can also add the Hebrew text used by early Jewish readers differs from the Masoretic text which in turn differs from the Samaritan text (which is limited only to the Pentateuch). The differences between the texts are often not major, except in issues of chronology, where it becomes clear that just modern biblical texts display the personal preferences of the translator, so do the source texts. Whatever criticisms are leveled at modern texts, can also be leveled at the older ones, including our source texts in Hebrew and Greek.

And of course, as for the NSRV, it containts the Book of Judith which opens with the blatant historical falsity of: It was the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh.

For me, this raises a question or two ... but I am not a man of faith, at least not in religion.

Thu, 2010-12-30 15:22 — RFM

@Keir, I very much share your view on the uncomfortable alliance between atheism and rightwing political views, I should point out here that I do not share Hitchens perspective on the threat that Islam supposedly poses to western civilisation, and I am not a fan of Sam Harris at all.

I do, however, disagree with your view on the usefulness of literal translations. It is important to bear in mind that the Hebrew texts are themselves loaded with political influence, the NSRV to which Terence referred also contains the books of Macabees which are propagandistic in scope, but so are Genesis through Deuteronomy, and if one compares Chronicles to Kings, it is also obvious that the two books are derived from different ideologies. And that is true in the Hebrew text and is not a shortcoming of the different translations.

Thu, 2010-12-30 16:17 — RFM

@Anon, my atheism is towards gods for which we have names and adherents. The Bible shows itself to be a text most incongruent with the history of the world in which it emerged. It is not merely inaccurate, but it is downright deceptive. There is no mention in the Bible for example of Yahweh being a son of El, the chief deity of the Canaanite Pantheon. That was the state of affairs for your average Canaanite, of which the Israelites in the North and the Judeans in the South were members. Like Baal, Yahweh was a storm god until the Judeans decided otherwise. Judaism with Yahweh as the only god is very much a product of the Babylonian exile.

There is also no trace of the alleged conquest of Canaan by an invading Israelite army, and if you add to that that the Israelites and Judeans were actually descendents of the Canaanites, then you can also infer that there was no period of slavery in Egypt from which the Israelites were freed, hence no exodus. And if there was no exodus, then there also was no pact between Yahweh and Israel. Hence, where did that notion come from? It was created by man to serve the purposes of man.

As Anselm said, god is that than which no greater being can be conceived of, that which cannot be improved upon. Well, Yahweh certainly benefited from being improved by the hand of man. So much so that Yahweh was involved in scoring victories in events which clearly never happened. Yahweh doesn't seem to be a very convincing god, too much human editing, as for the devil, well, he wasn't always the devil or evil, he came to be the evil devil because the old gods had to be displaced and made to be inferior to Yahweh, the Bible even attests to this in conversation between Moses and Yahweh. There is little more reason to believe in Yahweh as the creator than there is to believe in his father, El, the virile old man described as being well endowed and active with many female deities, as being the creator.

Undoubtedly, the god which you cannot discount is not Yahweh or El, so the history of ancient Canaan is not of much use there. But if I may ask, why, if the universe is created, does it necessarily have to be the work of a god? And why only one? For most of history, people believed in pantheons, in ancient Egypt, order was kept through the gods acting in concert. It is not necessarily more plausible to have one very powerful creator than having many less powerful beings working together to achieve creation. But would they all be eternal? Would salvation for humanity be one of their concens? Or is personal salvation merely a human preoccupation?

The last paragraph is an entirely different notion from the ones dealing with the god of the Abrahamic faiths, but we can never know that god, those gods, creators or whatever it is that they may be, because if it were down to our imaginations (used in a non-pejorative sense), its/their substance is limited only by what we can conceive of. So, which god then is it that you want me to disprove? Or phrased differently, which god is it that you want me to believe in? A god which we cannot know? Why bother with such a being? If the gods for which we have names were all conceived by people, then why is it implausible to believe that the concept of god was also conceived of by people as suggested by the current earliest available evidence of supernatural beings depicted in imagery typical of the Upper Paleolithic period?

There is much evidence to show how man has through the ages created and nurtured his deities, apart from the existence of the universe, which is not even accepted having been created, what evidence is there that god created and nurtured man?

I will leave it at that.

Thu, 2010-12-30 17:06 — Keir

If these political influences were obvious, there would be agreement about it. But there is certainly not agreement- quite the opposite, in fact.

But there seems to be a remarkable principle given precedent here. It would appear that political virtual editing of ancient texts is acceptable if they are themselves deemed the products of political influence. By this token, translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Granth Sahib, the Qur'an and many other religious texts may not have to reflect the political views of their original authors. One also wonders how Adam Smith may read in Muscovite paperbacks, or Tressell' s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists survives in Mandarin.

Not that this has much to do with so-called literal translation. While formal, 'literal' versions naturally suit right-wing purposes, it's not true that dynamically equivalent translations are free from external influence, to which one needs to be always alert. The point here is that, if a person wants to study seriously, a 'literal' translation is of very little use. A modern dynamic equivalence version is much more likely to enlighten, provided that the translation is generally competent, as the better known ones certainly are. It's what they are for.

Thu, 2010-12-30 17:24 — Terrence Lockyer1

I fear Keir's obvious enthusiasm for the GNB (TEV) leads to contradictions: in the same breath denying and then admitting (and indeed claiming as a virtue) that this version is not a close translation, which is what "dynamically equivalent" means. Also, to say that any translation "presents the meaning of the original author as he would write it in the target language" is false: a translation presents the translators' understanding of the meaning of the original author as the translator feels it may most effectively be expressed in the target language. This is not a trivial distinction.

Suffice it to say that I know many who use different versions of the Bible for reference, study, devotional, and teaching purposes, and none of these regards the GNB as best for such purposes (whatever may be its merits for others, particularly for providing a translation for those who English is less developed). Some also favour the New Jerusalem Bible for literary reasons. And, pace Keir, scholars do indeed use translations, because translation is a kind of running commentary on the source text, giving the translator's considered understanding thereof.

Of course no translation is perfect; of course each translation makes compromises and reflects contemporary interpretations in the circles that produce the translations. No sophisticated reader is unaware of this. Then again, even those reading the original languages do not all agree on interpretation at every point, so that is somewhat irrelevant: the best a reader in translation can do is to use a variety of well-regarded versions, and try to be aware of what biases are present in each.

By the way, it is also untrue to say that Tyndale translated the Bible "out of Latin": in fact, and while he certainly knew and consulted Latin and other translations, his source text for the New Testament was Erasmus' edition of the Greek.

Thu, 2010-12-30 18:19 — Keir

'This is not a trivial distinction.'

It's certainly just that, unless one can show a particular translation to be faulty. That's very rarely the case; though political bias is easy enough to spot.

'Suffice it to say that I know many'

The plural of anecdote is not data. The United Bible Societies use the GNB as model for their translators' guide. Otoh, the same Bible version sold in enormous numbers, to schools and churches, as well as to private individuals, before the NIV came along. Many schools still use it, and even now there does not seem to be a better version available for that use.

'Some also favour the New Jerusalem Bible for literary reasons. '

Or because they are Catholics? Right wing tendencies, here, again? Why all this gratuitous comment about translations, anyway? Is it what might be called the Vulgate Tendency in operation?

'scholars do indeed use translations'

At home. Not at work. Quoting a translation as evidence is the most embarrassing suicide!

'untrue to say that Tyndale translated the Bible "out of Latin":'

Not in the sense intended, which is that Tyndale translated away from Latin, a very brave thing to do, as it was for those who printed and read his work. The point is that the impetus that drove that past danger does not seem to have entirely receded, and those who now advertise the KJV may stand in that grim tradition.