Words that come down to us from the King James Bible

“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 forever…The thing that hath been, is that which shall be… and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Well, that’s telling us. And there’s more. The Preacher, usually reckoned to be King Solomon, talks about the worldly wealth he has amassed: the “silver and gold, and all the peculiar treasures of kings.”

And then, in a passage that should prick the conceit of any puffed up banker who insists they are worth their extravagant bonuses, he adds: “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought… and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”

It is a sobering lesson on the foolishness of vanity, and the conceit of believing ourselves to be more important than we are. But it is something more than that. It is great poetry, too.

The King James Bible is full of wonderful expressions that have become part of the very fabric of the English language.

“Let there be light”, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”; “eat, drink and be merry”, “see eye to eye”; “a thorn in the flesh”, “the root of the matter”, “set your house in order”, “how are the mighty fallen”, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, “gird up your loins”, “no peace for the wicked”, “a fly in the ointment”, “the love of money is the root of all evil” – they all appear in the pages of King James, though sometimes not quite in the form they have come down to us today.

Take “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”, for example. It never appears in precisely that form. Instead, Matthew 7:15 has :“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” It is easy enough to see how we arrived at the modern idiom.

The linguist David Crystal, in his book Begat: The King James Bible & The English Language, calculates that there are no fewer than 257 expressions in common use today which are to be found in the King James Bible. He admits to being surprised it is actually this few.

But “no other single source has provided the language with so many idiomatic expressions,” he says. That includes Shakespeare – who has contributed fewer than 100.

So magisterial, and so influential, is the poetry in the King James Bible that it is easy, sometimes, to forget that this isn’t a work of English literature at all, points out Dr Kevin Killeen, a lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of York.

It is a translation of much older biblical texts, written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Much of it was actually lifted from earlier translations of the Bible into English – such as John Wycliffe’s, published between 1383 to 1395, and William Tyndale’s New Testament, published in 1526.

Even worse, the King James Bible was put together by a committee – or to be precise six committees, consisting in all of about 50 scholars commanded by King James to produce a definitive version of the Bible in English.

That does, Dr Killeen admits, seem to fly in the face of our modern prejudice that you cannot “produce a beautiful piece of literature by committee”. But then the earlier translations that the King James Committee drew on extensively, Tyndale’s in particular, were themselves consummate works of art. Much, though by no means all, of the beautiful poetry in King James comes from Tyndale.

Given that, why is it that we are this year making such a fuss about the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible? Why is it this version, first published in 1611, that has been established in our minds today as the definitive early English translation?

Some of it is probably down to luck and the vagaries of chance, says Dr Killeen. In the 17th century two English Bibles were predominant: the King James version, published in 1611, and the Geneva version, produced by protestant exiles from the bloody reign of Queen Mary and printed in Geneva in 1560.

The Geneva Bible, Dr Killeen says, came complete with a set of margin notes that made uncomfortable reading for any monarch – wry comments on corrupt Old Testament kings that cut very close to the political bone in the seething climate of political and religious fear that characterised much of the Tudor period from Henry VIII onwards.

Cheaply printed and mass produced, the Geneva Bible was in wide circulation when King James came to the throne in March 1603 following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, Dr Killeen says. The new king didn’t much like it. “And one of his main gripes was to do with the notes.”

So the king commissioned a new, authorised version of the Bible: one without the notes.

The traditional Protestant story about the translation of the Bible into English was that it struck a blow for ordinary people against the Catholic church, by making the Bible accessible to anyone who could read English.

Things are actually more complicated than that, Dr Killeen says. The Bible had long been translated into the vernacular in most countries in Europe, and the Vatican itself had, in 1609, authorised the publication of a complete Bible in English, the Douay Rheims version.

But King James seemed to want to draw a line under years of religious and political infighting by producing a standard, possibly politically safe version of the Bible that would be used and read in churches throughout the land – and that would put an end to political and religious dissent.

If that was what he hoped for, Dr Killeen says, he didn’t succeed. The Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics raged in continental Europe from 1618-1648. King James refused to become involved, and was seen by many as betraying the Protestant cause.

In churches up and down the country, people read aloud Old Testament parables about neglectful kings. And the new, supposedly ‘safe’ Bible didn’t help James’s son, Charles I, who famously lost his head following the English Civil War.

So the King James Bible did not unite the kingdom in undying harmony.

But what is did do was make it safe for ordinary people to read the Bible in their own language.

For much of the previous century, the Bible in English had been a forbidden fruit.

With the publication of the officially authorised King James version, ordinary people were no longer forbidden to read the Bible for themselves, indeed they were positively encouraged to do so, says Jonathan Draper, Canon Theologian at York Minster.

That represented a huge turning point. And the sheer beauty of the language, and the memorable turn of phrase of the King James Bible probably did the rest in ensuring its place in the nation’s hearts.

The language is simple, and elegant, and often utterly memorable, Canon Draper says. It was written to be read aloud. “The people who made it had a real ear for the way the language sounds,” he says. “That makes it memorable. And because it is memorable, people ingested it, and it became part of our way of thinking.”

And that is why this 400th anniversary is worth celebrating. The King James Bible is part of who we all are, regardless of whether we’re believers or not.

OTHER modern idioms derived from the King James Bible (though some were lifted from earlier translations)

Know for a certainty
To every thing there is a season
Much study is a weariness of the flesh
Beat their swords into ploughshares
Be horribly afraid
Get thee behind me
Suffer little children
Turned the world upside down
A thorn in the flesh
Let us now praise famous men
Be fruitful and multiply
Rain bread (manna) from heaven
Tables (tablets) of stone
Love Thy neighbor as thyself
The skin of my teeth
Many are called, but few are chosen
Render… unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s
Kick against the pricks
Lesser lights
Signs of the times…
… and lots, lots more

• THERE will be a number of events in York later this year to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. They include:

• An exhibition, A Book Fit For A King, at York Minster’s Old Palace from July 7 to November 30, exploring the history and legacy of the translation of the Bible into English

• October 17 to 21: Big Draw at York Minster. Inspiration for this year’s event will be taken from descriptive passages from the King James Bible

• A ‘Bring Your Family Bible’ roadshow at Ken Spelman Rare Books in Micklegate, York, where an expert can tell you about your Bible

• The University of York will be hosting an academic conference, The Bible In The Seventeenth Century, at King’s Manor, from July 7 to 9

• To find out more about these and other activities planned to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, visit the calendar page of the York Minster website, at yorkminster.org/calendar/