The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #135039   Message #3076930
Posted By: Slag
18-Jan-11 - 03:28 AM
Thread Name: BS: How the Bible altered how we speak
Subject: RE: BS: How the Bible altered how we speak
You are getting what worked well as a translation ca 1611. Poetic? Yes but then much of the Bible is poetry. The KJV is or at least has been the most quoted book in English literature and Wm. Shakespeare the second most quoted and the work Shakespeare himself quoted the most was, well, you guessed it! the Bible!

With a very few notable exceptions the KJV is a very accurate translation and most modern printings take pains to note what the actual Hebrew, Aramaic or Koine Greek text is. Yes, italicized words in the KJV are interpolated from the meaning of the original languages but do not exist in fact. They are there for English grammar's sake or for clarity of understanding. Where the word "Lord" or "God" is all in caps it stands for the tetragrammaton, the four letter Hebrew for the un-utterable name of God, YHWH. If you are a student of the Bible, the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible is a great aid and it includes a complete Hebrew and Greek Dictionary of all the original text words used and the pronunciation key is accurate to boot!

One tradition has it the Mr. Shakespeare was himself one of the otherwise anonymous translators of the KJV and that he left his signature of a sort in the work. In 1611, the year of publication Shakespeare was 46 years old. In Psalms 46, the 46th word in from the beginning is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear". coincidence? Possibly.