The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  The language has caused some controversy. The preface says: ‘We have not tied ourselves to an uniformity of phrasing or an identity of words as some peradventure would wish that we had done.’ An example already given is the translation of the same Greek verb as ‘rejoice’, then ‘glory’, then ‘joy’.

  It is important to pay full tribute to the Hebrew. It is said by those who know the language that the Hebrew version of the Old Testament is an unparalleled work. Certainly it has lent itself to Greek, Latin and English translations of outstanding authority. Tyndale was captivated by what he saw as the close fit, even a natural affinity, between Hebrew and Old English and his deep study of Hebrew undoubtedly enriched his translation.

  This is not to diminish the skill or often the genius of the greatest of the English translators in finding the resonant native word, discovering a rhythm, making it memorable; all this sometimes beyond the call of textural accuracy. Translation has a romance of its own: the early Hebrew texts were begat by even more distant scrolls and before that . . . and before that . . . Knowledge passed on like a baton, meanings more layered than the seven cities of Troy.

  Over 90 per cent of the words in the King James Bible are Old English, despite being filtered through Hebrew, Greek and Latin and tinctured with global imports. And, as mentioned in what turned out to be a shrewd move, the language used was rather antique even for 1611. Yet these older terms, once the Bible had found its place in the hearts of the English-speaking peoples and fastened into the mind were a source of pride. As if in some way they had been there in the beginning, the King James Version had a dignity set apart from the current world. It allowed the faithful to believe that it was in these measured ways that the prophets and the Apostles, even Moses and Christ Himself would have preached.

  The high-mindedness of the translators cannot be questioned. But they were also creatures of their time, in ways a coarser time than some of the centuries that followed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Bible’s popularity and general influence was at its height, there was a concern with biblical words which, natural for the age of Shakespeare, were worrying in a later time. The American educator, Noah Webster (1758 – 1843), responsible for the dictionary that helped establish American-English spelling, was alarmed at ‘piss’, ‘privy member’, ‘prostitute’, ‘teat’, ‘whore’ and ‘womb’.

  Despite this, the prose rode the centuries and matched the changing times. Isaiah xl, 4 – 5 led directly to one of the twentieth century’s greatest flights of oratory: from Martin Luther King, as already quoted, beginning, famously: ‘I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low . . .’

  The word ‘bible’ comes, via the French, from the Latin ‘biblia’ meaning ‘the book’ and the Greek ‘ta biblia’ which means ‘the books’. It is both and has also been a prolific generator of other books and a generous treasury of words, phrases, titles, stories, proverbs and arguments.

  It was read for its literary qualities after it had embedded itself as the Christian Book of Truth. Which is not to say that its literary qualities were unrecognised early on: they were, however, and for many still are, of secondary importance. Although Christianity came under attack when rigorous scholarly scrutiny in the nineteenth century challenged the historical basis of the books in both the Old Testament and the New, the Bible was not dismissed. It was released into another life. Shelley, the notorious atheist, loved the poetry and the freedom-seeking aspects of the Bible. Matthew Arnold the late nineteenth-century commander of literary culture also valued the style in its poetry and prose. This position was not without its opponents, as David Jasper and Stephen Prickett point out in their close study, The Bible and Literature. The poets T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis both took issue with the position adopted by Arnold. ‘I cannot help suspecting,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘. . . that those who read the bible as literature do not read the bible.’

  That the Bible is principally literature is something many now take for granted. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Robert Lowth, a Professor of Poetry at Oxford, reassessed the Psalms, discovered a Hebraic tradition in the construction of those verses, referred that back to the oral traditions in European poetry and opened the door for his contemporaries to begin to claim poetry itself as ‘a prophet, a seer, and mediate of divine truth’. It still unlocks windows.

  Blake and Wordsworth as poets took on this biblical/mystical mantle and role. When the polemical atheist Shelley also assumed it, the Bible’s effect on the English writers of poetry and prose was refreshed (‘the distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error,’ according to Shelley). More importantly, secular poetry could now claim that it too was heir to the prophets and the psalmists and had access equally to truths hidden from the generality. It is significant that Coleridge, who wrote extensively on the imagination of the poet, spent the last twenty years of his life integrating that with what he called ‘the Sacred Book’.

  Literature was not only acknowledged in the Bible itself, it was beginning to claim both the literary status and the spiritual reach of the Scriptures. The secular sought to take over the properties of the sacred.

  D.H. Lawrence expressed this with his usual vigour. ‘The novel is the book of life,’ he wrote. ‘In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bathsheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses’ head.’

  According to Lawrence, ‘all the bible’ is is one of the ‘supreme old novels’. Writing of how he worked: ‘I always feel as if I should be naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me – and it’s rather an awful feeling.’ According to Lawrence, the Bible has been taken over and overtaken by secular literature. Others followed his banner. Is it more a historical novel than history? Some argue that case just as they claim that the best way to understand the people in the Old and New Testaments is to consider them as fictional characters. One eminent literary scholar and scrutineer of the Bible reads the Book of Books as part of the literature of imagination (as Coleridge had done) and puts it in the context of ‘Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Pynchon and the novels of Henry Green’.

  Although he applauded the literary nature of the Bible, the theologian and philosopher Austin Farrer wrote: ‘it is a sort of sacrilege to recommend the Bible as culture or amusement. The story of David and Absalom is a better piece of literature than Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, but that has nothing to do with the reason for which we read the books of Samuel.’

  But as the Bible was seen more as part of the general culture than the central and essential book of faith, it was opened up to the sort of enquiry and analysis from which its sacred claims had for so long protected it. The movement for the emancipation of women, to take a striking example, attacked what they saw as an unjust, skewed and unacceptably patriarchal faith. The Bible said that woman was a mere rib of Adam; she was always inferior to men, largely silent, and powerless.

  In 1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton sailed into this in The Woman’s Bible. One of her examples was Samson, so magnificently honoured in the tale told in the Bible itself and in Milton’s equally holy version Samson Agonistes. Now that the Bible can be viewed as fiction, its ‘characters’ can be discussed as characters in fiction but – and this is the extra power charge – they can also be abused for being as they were in the history of ‘patriarchal’ literature. She wrote:Samson was most unfortunate in all his associations with women. It is a pity that the angel who impressed on his parents the importance of everything that pertained to the physical development of this child, had not made some suggestions to them as to the development of his moral character. Even his physical prowess was not used by him for any great moral purpose. To kill
a lion, to walk off with the gates of a city, to catch three hundred foxes and to tie them together by their tails, two by two, with firebrands to burn the cornfields and the vineyards – all this seems more like the follies of a boy than the military tactics of a great general or the statesmanship of a Judge in Israel.

  We have travelled a long way from the passionate reverence accorded to the Bible as Holy Scripture and the excited acceptance that it could also be read as great literature. It can be mocked. ‘Worship’ in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, described as ‘one of the greatest of all intellectual Biblical “readings” ’ is now ‘washup’. He writes: ‘I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup’.

  Given that the Bible has been uprooted and mined it is the more remarkable that it persists still as a source for literature. From the beginning its force field magnetised the style and the imagination of the finest writers in the English language. And it might seem curious, given that the King James Version was published in 1611, just five years before Shakespeare’s death, but a case can be made for using Shakespeare as the starting point for this influence of the Bible on writers: and on readers.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FROM SHAKESPEARE - THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE (1)

  The King James Bible was published in 1611 and Shakespeare died in 1616. It would seem there was little chance of a direct influence. Yet by an indirect route, we can trace how it did influence Shakespeare. There is also a teasing possibility that Shakespeare worked on Psalm 46.

  Shakespeare and the Bible are often twinned. They came out of the same period in the formation of the English language, in the late English Renaissance when, according to the writer of our foundation Dictionary, Dr Samuel Johnson, it was ‘a golden age’, a time that marked the beginning of English ‘literary perfection’.

  At a time of mutually incomprehensible dialects in the British islands, the Bible and Shakespeare established what would become the standard, and the earthing of the literary language. The plays and poems of Shakespeare are almost as numerous as the books in the Bible and on those two pillars have been built a magnificence of world literature.

  We can see how seriously Shakespeare took his church when we go to the Holy Trinity today. On his retirement to his native town he built himself a fine monument which, with his grave and those of his family, is within the altar rails. Nearby is a first edition of the King James Version, from which he might have read aloud in that church.

  As a boy Shakespeare would have been obliged to attend the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon regularly. The Bible would also have been a teaching instrument in his grammar school, alongside Ovid and Virgil. His work is steeped in it. But from which Bible did his knowledge derive?

  The Bible which Shakespeare is likely to have heard in the church which he attended regularly as a boy would have been the Geneva Version. The Geneva Bible, like the New Testament and the first five books of the Old Testament (together with some of the Proverbs), was overwhelmingly Tyndale’s translation.

  Ronald Mansbridge has proved that the Geneva Version, which was first printed in 1560 (it went through at least 140 printings), was on the whole even more dependent on Tyndale than the King James Version.

  A few of his examples, built up from a word count, are:

  Genesis xiii: 81.4 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible.

  85.1 per cent Tyndale in the King James Bible.

  Deuteronomy viii: 81.5 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible.

  79.1 per cent Tyndale in the King James Bible.

  Matthew iii: 85.3 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible.

  82.3 per cent Tyndale in the King James Bible.

  Revelation xx: 92.7 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible.

  92.5 per cent Tyndale in the King James Bible.

  From these and other examples offered by Ronald Mansbridge, the total comes to 83.4 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible and 81.6 per cent in the King James Bible. He writes: ‘I believe this sample is statistically valid of the whole New Testament and the books of the Old Testament within a margin of possible error of 2 or 3 per cent.’

  No wonder that Stephen Greenblatt, in his Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, wrote: ‘without Tyndale’s New Testament and Cranmer’s Prayer Book, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare the playwright.’ Shakespeare quotes hundreds of times from the Geneva translation and because of the overlap between the Geneva and the King James it is possible to claim that Shakespeare was influenced by most of what would become the King James Bible. Shakespeare quotes from the Bible about 1,350 times.

  The Geneva Bible was the Bible first taken to America, and although it soon became supplanted by the King James Version, the same argument can be applied to its early influence there as has been applied to its influence on Shakespeare.

  Professor A.L. Rowse did a masterful study of the influence on Shakespeare of the Bible and the Prayer Book. He points out that ‘there are definite allusions to 42 books of the bible.’ He notes that ‘the story of Cain is referred to twenty-five times, Jeptha . . . in at least seven passages, Samson . . . nine, David . . . six, Goliath . . . three, Solomon . . . nine, Job . . . twenty-five, Judas . . . perhaps twenty-three, Peter . . . seven, Pilate . . . seven, the Prodigal Son . . . nine, Dives and Lazarus . . . seven, the Whore of Babylon . . . seven.’ To take one example from so many: in Richard II, the lines ‘Edward’s seven sons, whereof thyself art one/Were as seven vials of his sacred blood’ are from Revelation: ‘And there came one of the seven Angels, which had the seven vials and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither: I will shew unto thee the judgement of the great whore that sitteth upon the many waters’.

  More importantly, Rowse stresses the effect of an unconscious education. ‘He was grounded at church . . . the Bible provided the bed of popular culture . . . it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this grounding.’

  We read of Thomas Hardy as a boy walking two miles to and from school through the woods every day and noting those minute transformations in nature which texture his work; he became a man who ‘noticed such things’. That daily trudge in all seasons had become as a university and a bedding for the imagination which would always be expressed through that particular rural landscape. And Dickens, as a boy, on his trek from Camden Town to the blacking factory in central London, and then all over London as a man, unconsciously storing the booming, varied, fractured metropolis deep in his mind. Mark Twain up and down the Mississippi, Balzac in Paris, Joyce deep-dipped in Dublin – on they go, the procession of writers and other artists whose most enduring and most nuanced education came from what they learned unconsciously, from what was absorbed through the curiosity of their own selection rather than being implanted or hammered in by others.

  How much more so in the case of a boy, and a youth, who became the greatest master man of words? And ‘the greatest mind’ as Harold Bloom, the American critic, wrote, ‘we shall ever know’. The words of the Bible must have made their own library in the mind of the young Shakespeare; and the rhythms, the abrupt switches of narrative, the contradictions, the high drama, the tenderness and the brutality – all there, read by priests whose chief skill might have lain in reading aloud. And these stories, very likely to be read again alone in his house, one of the few books to which he would have had access and therefore, for that reason, to such a boy, a magnet.

  Here are three specific ‘borrowings’:Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. (Matthew)

  There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now. (Hamlet)

  Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. (Corinthians)

  The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

  For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew)

  Death for Death. Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still FOR MEASURE. (Measure for Measure)

  As a postscript to Shakespeare and the Bible, there is in circulation one of those many claims in which, by esoteric numerological calculations, Shakespeare is ‘proved’ to have been someone else entirely, or his works to have cabbalistic properties. In McAfee’s The Greatest English Classic, he examines the claim that the scholars who put together the final version of the King James Bible called on Shakespeare’s help with the Psalms. Not entirely unlikely. His reputation as a poet was very high, higher, in refined circles, than his popular fame as a playwright. Psalm 46 is the most frequently quoted as revealing the master’s voice.

  The argument is that Shakespeare worked on this when he was 46 years old – that would be 1606. If 46 words are counted from the start of the Psalms you will find the word ‘shake’. If 46 words are counted from the end (excluding the word ‘Selah’ which is considered to have no meaning but be merely a form of punctuation), you come across the word ‘spear’.

  There is more. Take the number 10. This is 4 and 6 added together. 46 once again! Ten verses into the psalm, you count in 6 words and get ‘I am’. Count 4 words on and you get ‘will’. If you reverse the 6 and the 4, you get 46 and ‘William’! Who could doubt it?