If there is a single attribute large numbers of readers attach almost reflexively to the King James Version, it is most likely eloquence. The warrant for this attribution is abundantly evident. Eloquence ― a term associated with oratory, especially delivered orally ― suggests a powerful marshalling of the resources of language to produce a persuasive effect, and that quality is manifested in verse after verse of the 1611 translation.

It is an intrinsic quality of this English rendering of the Bible that no doubt has been heightened by the virtually canonical status the King James Bible came to enjoy and by the performance of passages from it in ecclesiastical settings or on other solemn occasions. If it became almost a convention in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s to introduce a sonorous recitation of the Twenty-Third Psalm in deathbed scenes, this biblical illumination of the cinematic moment was surely felt to be appropriate because the beautifully cadenced language of the King James Version of that psalm is such a moving expression of trust in God even in life's darkest moments.

The eloquence of the 1611 translation nevertheless deserves some scrutiny in regard to its sources, its nature, its relation to the original language of the Bible, and the degree to which it may or may not be pervasive in these English renderings of the biblical texts.

Let me propose at the outset that the eloquence of the narrative prose and the eloquence of the poetry are not cut from the same cloth, however much readers tend to lump them together ― something they may be encouraged to do by the fact that the King James Bible provides no typographical differentiation between poetry and prose. For the prose, the committees convened by King James adopted a translation strategy, adumbrated by Tyndale a century earlier, meant to create close equivalents for the Hebrew diction and syntax, and that resulted in a particular kind of forceful effect which was new in English. An exemplary instance is the beginning of the report of the flood in Genesis 7:17-21:

And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up upon the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.

It should be said that the flood story, though it shares certain features with other kinds of narrative prose in the Bible, is not entirely typical because in its solemnity and in its rhythmically choreographed account of portentous primeval events it has a kind of epic grandeur. That, of course, is precisely an occasion for the exhibition of eloquence, which is finely exploited by the 1611 translators.

The parallel syntax of the Hebrew, elsewhere deployed for other purposes, here is used to present a stately parade of clauses linked by "and" that report the sequence of momentous acts in which the whole earth is covered by the waters of the flood. Laying everything out in these parallel structures is not, I think, a natural way to package units of syntax in English, though it became a viable option for literary English after the King James Version.

The King James translators, by following the syntactic contours of the Hebrew, achieved a new kind of compelling effect, at once lofty and almost stark. The antithetical strategy of modern translations of the Bible by sundry scholarly-ecclesiastical committees has been to repackage the syntax of the original in order to convey a sense that it might have been written in the twentieth century. What is lost in eloquence is palpable.

Compare, for example, "And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters," with the rendering of the Revised English Bible: "The ark floated on the surface of the swollen waters as they increased over the earth." The modern version is clear ― the pursuit of perfect clarity being one of the great fallacies among modern translators of the Bible ― and has a certain succinct tidiness, but it loses all the high solemnity of the King James Version. Instead of the report of three actions in grand sequence conveyed by three verbs ― the prevailing and the increasing of the waters, and the movement of the ark over the waters ― the "prevailing" of the flood is tucked into an adjective, "swollen," and the increase of the waters is relegated to a subordinate clause, with the movement of the ark now "logically" placed at the beginning of the sentence. An epic movement, in sum, has been reduced to a prosaic notation.

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Beyond considerations of syntax, much of the force of the 1611 translation derives from the kind of diction to which it generally adheres, at least in the narrative prose. There is a good deal of evidence that the writers of ancient Hebrew narrative, by a tacit consensus of literary convention, used a deliberately restricted vocabulary. Synonymity, which is often rich and inventive in biblical poetry, was rigorously avoided, and a lexicon of primary terms rather than fancy literary ones was generally favoured. By and large, the King James translators honour this ancient commitment to plain diction and the repetition of terms.

Note in our passage how "the flood was forty days upon the earth" and how "the ark went upon the face of the waters." The taut eloquence of the narrative inheres partly in the use, faithful to the original, of such simple primary terms ― here, the verbs to be, to go. Alas, modern translators, evidently feeling that this is not the way they would have written the story, have not been able to resist the temptation of improving the original. Thus, as we have seen, in the Revised English Bible, the ark is made to "float," not "go," upon the waters, and in a still more fanciful exercise of editorial license, the Jewish Publication Society translation has the ark "drift." (Are we certain that Noah's craft was rudderless?)

Other word choices in the 1611 version work equally well, even if one might have marginal reservations about a few of them. For the most part, as is evident here, a homespun Anglo-Saxon vernacular is favoured, which is a good English equivalent of the plain diction of the Hebrew. Elsewhere, the use of such polysyllabic Latinate terms as "iniquity," "tribulation," "countenance" and "habitation" might be questioned, though all those words by now bear the authoritative weight of the canonical.

In our passage, "prevailed" is an interesting if slightly odd choice, probably dictated by the fact that this same Hebrew verb is used elsewhere for prevailing in battle, though the local sense seems to be something like "surged." Another reiterated verb, "increased," is a fair enough rendering of the Hebrew and is idiomatically right in context, though a small opportunity is missed in not using "multiplied," the English equivalent for this Hebrew verb that is employed in the creation story, for there is a pointed irony that the same activity of multiplication initially applied to human procreation is now attached to the destruction of all living things.

The King James translators, of course, had no notion of reiterated thematic key words as a formal literary device in biblical narrative, and so their choices sometimes reproduce the device and sometimes, as here, obscure it. Their language in this case, as in so many other instances, nevertheless does capture a great deal of the evocative driving force of the original.

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Throughout the translation of the Bible's narrative prose, the emulation in English of the Hebrew's plain diction and parallel syntax conveys the paradoxical sense of a discourse at once plain and elevated. The case of poetry is more complicated. Biblical poetry uses a noticeably richer vocabulary than does the narrative prose, and at least some of it appears to be specialized poetic vocabulary, sometimes incorporating archaic terms and archaic grammatical forms.

Because semantic parallelism between the two ― in some instances, three ― parts of the poetic line is fundamental to the system, the poets play with many different possibilities of synonymity, though it also should be said that usually the ostensible echoing of the first half of the line in the second half involves some sort of heightening, intensification, or even narrative development.

The structure of biblical Hebrew, in which subjects, objects and pronominal references can all be packed into a single word through prefixes, suffixes, or conjugated forms, lends itself to a terrific compactness, a feature repeatedly exploited, rhythmically and otherwise, by the poets. The compactness is a special challenge for translators because the structure of English is so radically different, and the King James translators do not appear to have paid much attention to the conciseness of the original, focused as they were on the literal meaning of the Hebrew words and not on how they sounded. This did not prevent them from achieving effects of great eloquence in rendering the poetry, but it was often not a Hebrew eloquence, as I will try to show.

The one bit of poetry from the King James Version that most native speakers of English know by heart is this line from the Twenty-Third Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." It is certainly eloquent, but is the eloquence biblical? I argue that it is not, the difference being between a wonderfully expansive utterance and a powerfully succinct one.

The English deploys seventeen words, with twenty syllables. (That ratio neatly reflects the degree to which the translation on the whole aptly chooses short, simple words.) The Hebrew here shows just eight words, eleven syllables, and sounds something like this: gam ki-’elekh begey’ tsalmavet lo’ ’ira’ ra‘. The English makes evocative use of a string of three noun phrases, "through the valley of the shadow of death," which has the effect of spinning out the skein of the beleaguered walker's trajectory through the valley to the very brink of death. The Hebrew has not a single "of" and only one preposition, itself no more than a particle attached to the beginning of the word that means "valley." "Shadow of death" (some scholars, but not I, think it means merely "darkness") is a single word, more or less like "deathshadow," and "valley" is joined to it in what amounts to a genitive structure that dispenses with "of."

The English version, though not set as verse, feels like a line of poetry, but it is a kind of free-verse poetry that is almost an anticipation of Walt Whitman. One thinks of all those lengthy lines of Whitman's that sweep on grandly across the page from left margin to right, and it is surely relevant that Whitman was influenced by the King James Version, and, in particular, by the Psalms.

This microscopic example tells us something about the general character of the translation of poetry in the King James Version. It often reads magnificently as English verse ― one recalls, among a host of memorable instances, many of the Psalms, the voice from the whirlwind in Job, the haunting poem on mortality at the end of Ecclesiastes. Eloquence seems the proper attribute for these renderings of ancient Hebrew poetry, yet, as in the line from the Twenty-Third Psalm, the eloquence is more Jacobean than biblical ― orotund, expansive, at times exhibiting a relish in the accumulation of ringing words and syllables, whereas the Hebrew is compact and incisive.

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Let me venture a general qualification about the admired eloquence of the seventeenth-century translation. Because the translators were constantly concentrating on the words, straining to work out the most precise English equivalents for each of them, they did not, as I have noted, pay a great deal of attention to the sound of the words, which, as in all poetry, is inseparable from their meaning. Intermittently, intuitively, they do appear to have listened to the sounds, as attested by the fine rendering of the great prose-poem that opens the book of Ecclesiastes, where there is good evidence that the translators were picking up the mesmerizing music of the Hebrew. But more often than most readers choose to remember, the translators exhibit an indifference to the cadences and the compactness of the Hebrew, blunting its pointed expressiveness.

Because we think automatically of eloquence when we think about the King James Version, we tend to overlook its lapses, the places where the language audibly stumbles. Here are the two lines of poetry that constitute the ninth verse of Psalm 30: "What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee, shall it declare thy truth?" The compact diction of the English is admirable throughout these two lines, and the rendering of the second line, with its emphatic parallelism ("praise thee," "declare thy truth") is perfectly apt. Yet something has gone awry rhythmically in the first of these two lines.

The Hebrew sounds like this: mah betsa‘ bedami / berideti ’el shahat. There are exactly three words, three accented syllables, in each half of the line, with a pounding alliteration of m's and b's in the first half. The King James translators could have reproduced the strong rhythm ― an expression of the speaker's desperate insistence ― by writing, "What profit in my blood." Fearful, however, that they might be obscuring an implied meaning, they felt obliged to add the words "is there," indicating by the italics that these are merely implied (in the first edition, it would have been smaller font in roman against the boldface gothic of the surrounding words). The consequence is to break the rhythm of the line.

The second half of the line, "when I go down to the pit" is a precise representation of the meaning of the three Hebrew words, but the problem with expressive sound has been magnified: it is not merely that we are given seven words for three but that the entire clause is rhythmically slack, the strong cadenced poetry of the original devolving into a prose amble.

The King James translators are at their best when they hew closely to the evocative simplicity of the Hebrew diction, as is evident in the example from the flood story, or even, despite the problems of rhythm, in the two lines from Psalm 30 that we have been considering. These learned churchmen ― some of them conversant in Arabic, Syriac and Aramaic as well as Hebrew and Greek ― of course viewed all of Scripture as sacred, and the assumed context of the sacred at times led them astray in their translation choices, either producing a kind of eloquence that is rather unbiblical or actually compromising the overall effect of eloquence.

Memorably, at the beginning of the creation story, they have God place a "firmament" between the waters above and the waters below. "Firmament" is a medieval astronomical term (Chaucer uses it), and it in fact has a certain etymological warrant because the Hebrew raqia’, conceived by the ancients as a vast celestial slab, derives from a verb that means "to pound out," though I am not entirely sure the King James translators were aware of the etymology. But it is something of a mouthful as an English word for "sky" and qualifies as what the Elizabethans called an inkhorn term, thus introducing an element of erudite fussiness of which there is no hint in the original.

That element is even more evident when the word is used in poetry, as at the beginning of Psalm 19: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." One might justifiably claim that this line of English poetry has real grandeur, but the presence of "firmament," where the Hebrew simply says "sky," imparts a note of formal elevation not intended by the ancient poet.

The reverential view of the Bible often leads the translators to opt for ecclesiastical or theologically fraught terms that give the biblical language a colouration fundamentally alien to it. In the fourth verse of Psalm 19, it is said of God that in the heavens "hath he set a tabernacle for the sun." Now, what God sets up in the heavens is actually a tent, the ordinary word for the prosaic dwelling, often made of black goat skins, which Bedouins and migratory pastoralists like Abraham used for shelter. "Tabernacle" enters the celestial scene because the translators are thinking ecclesiastically. It may be a nice flourish, but it falsifies the original, where three plain words ― "in-them" (one word in the Hebrew), "set" and "sun" ― are matched by the plain word used for the sun's dwelling, ’ohel, "tent."

A similar elevation of an ordinary Hebrew dwelling-place is observable in Psalm 18:11: "He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies." The first half of this line, up to the semicolon, seems to me just right. The second half runs into the difficulty of sprawling rhythm that we noted before, reflected in the unnecessary words in italics. More to our present purpose, "pavilion" is a suspect choice for the Hebrew sukkah, which means a "shelter," in some instances the rough thatched shelter set up by a watchman in a vegetable patch. What the learned divines of the seventeenth century obviously felt was that for the Lord of Hosts in his celestial setting something grander, something more imperial, was called for, and so they gave us "pavilion," which adds an impressive clarion note but is quite unlike the original.

In addition to these instances in which the King James Version introduces alien gestures of elevation, it also imposes an alien theological frame of reference through some of the English terms it uses. This was inevitable because the translators, after all, regarded both Testaments as inspired repositories of Christian faith.

Let me mention just one recurrent instance. The 1611 translation abounds in "salvation," especially in Psalms. "God of my salvation" is a wonderfully resonant phrase, and one is loath to give it up ― even I am, though I have rigorously excluded it from my own English version of Psalms. "Salvation," we all recognize, is a theologically loaded term, sometimes pointing to a vast eschatological horizon and sometimes to a dramatic transformation of the condition of the individual soul that will remain in effect for all eternity.

In the world of ancient Israel, however, with its unflagging commitment to the here-and-now, the word yeshu’ah, which is consistently rendered as "salvation," as well as the verb that is cognate with that noun, plainly suggest getting out of a tight fix, whether in battle or in other situations of danger or distress. Thus, the verb in question means something like "rescue," and, however it may grate on canonically tuned ears, the reiterated epithet for God actually means "God of my rescue." The God of my salvation, of course, is a deity who more comfortably dwells in pavilions than in shelters and who erects a tabernacle, not a tent, in the sky for the sun.

All this may sound, especially at this moment of four-century anniversary celebrations, like ungenerous carping, but I want to stress that what I have been saying does not constitute a stylistic critique of the King James Version. The kinds of terms about which I have been raising questions in fact often contribute to the general eloquence of this canonical translation. The problem is that in numerous places, by virtue of such momentary elevation of diction, the style becomes grandiloquent, which is fine in its own right but is nothing like the original.

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It is worth pursuing more broadly what the King James Version does with biblical poetry. Its rendering of the prose narratives of course affords many moving moments, but it is above all in the poetry that we feel we are being swept up by a grandeur of language that seems distinctive among all the possibilities of literary English.

Melville's attunement in Moby-Dick to the poetry of the King James Version is deeply instructive in this regard. His aspiration, which his own contemporaries did not fathom, was to create an American prose epic that would have the cosmic reach of Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's tragedies and the Bible itself. And so his language is sometimes highly Miltonic, more often, especially at moments of narrative intensity, Shakespearean, and very frequently biblical ― all intermingled with a good deal of pungent American vernacular.

But unlike other American writers whose styles bear the imprint of the King James Bible, Melville was drawn preponderantly to the poetry and not to the prose of Hebrew Scripture. He may not have fully perceived it as poetry, given the prose typography in which the translation presents it, but that would have been very much to his purpose, since he aspired to write poetic prose.

What is formally interesting is that, just as he internalised the iambic cadences of Shakespeare and Milton, producing many lines of prose that are fully scannable, he also internalised the semantic parallelism that is the foundation of the biblical poetic system, creating many lines built from emphatically parallel clauses that read like lines of biblical verse. What he sensed in biblical poetry was precisely its eloquence. If the stark and explosive poetry of King Lear in the night storm on the moor gave him a lexicon for representing the searing experience of men in an open boat on the tossing ocean in pursuit of a whale, then Psalms, Job and the Prophets offered him both a stylistic register for reaching from sky to abyss and a poetic vehicle for hammering insistence in the inter-echoing clauses of the parallelistic verse.

Here is an evocation of Ahab's torment, which reads like a lost verse from the book of Job, though there is no actual allusion: "He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails." Again, in describing the vat in which whale-blubber is rendered on the deck of the Pequod, Melville writes, "It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit." Despite two American colloquial touches here, this is a sentence that scans as a line of biblical poetry, and it would not be out of place in Isaiah.

I invoke the instance of Melville because it is always a strong testimony to genuine eloquence when a literary work can engender a kindred eloquence in a later writer. The 1611 translation made a difference not only in the subsequent history of English poetry but also, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the evolution of English prose.

The book of Job is the ultimate test of the power and imperfection of any translation because it is the pinnacle of biblical poetry, manifesting a forcefulness, a formal virtuosity and a vigour of inventive metaphor that make it one of the most brilliant achievements in all of ancient Mediterranean poetry.

It must be said that the Hebrew text of Job swarms with difficulties, at least in part because the ancient scribes, not entirely understanding the rich and sometimes exotic language they were transcribing, frequently scrambled it. One should not, then, fault the King James translators for failing to make sense of the many cruxes in the book ― their modern counterparts have done only somewhat better. But quite apart from any consideration of deciphering or reconstructing corrupted texts, how well did the 1611 translators convey the grandeur and the formal subtlety of the poetry of Job?

The broad-gauge answer has to be that their own poetic performance was impressively successful, or countless English readers ― Melville among them ― could scarcely have responded as they did to the strong poetry of Job's anguish or to the grand panorama of creation in the voice from the whirlwind. One must thus begin with the general assumption that the translation of Job is a prime piece of evidence for the splendid and enduring eloquence of the King James Version. Nevertheless, some qualifications are in order.

To pull this picture into focus, let us consider what the seventeenth-century translation does with Job's great death-wish poem in chapter 3, which opens the whole poetic argument of the book. Here are the first eleven lines of the poem, typographically presented as in the King James Version. For convenient reference, the verse numbers are incorporated in the quoted passage:

3. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man-child conceived. 4. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. 5. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. 7. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. 8. Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning. 10. Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from my eyes. 11. Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out from the belly? 12. Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? 13. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.

Some, but not all, of this is quite wonderful, amply confirming the 1611 translation's reputation for compelling eloquence. Among much to admire here, one might single out the way this version captures the driving force of the triadic Hebrew line in verse 5: "Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of day terrify it." "Stain" is a particularly fine English choice for a relatively rare Hebrew verb that means "to besmirch" or "to foul."

Accuracy in grasping the original is not the subject of our consideration, but this passage happens to contain one of the egregious errors of the King James Version, which it may be instructive to note. The cursers who in this version are "ready to raise up their mourning," whatever that might mean, in fact are "ready to rouse Leviathan." The mistake arose because livyatan, Leviathan, has a homonym that means "their mourning." The translators, even without knowing what we do through archaeological discoveries about Leviathan as a fearsome sea monster in Canaanite mythology, might have realized that they had gotten it wrong because what they construed as a possessive suffix would be a feminine plural, whereas the context requires a masculine plural. In any event, the result was that they missed the first introduction of the fabulous beast that will play a climactic role at the end of the poem in the speech from the whirlwind.

One other error in the passage is the result of uncharacteristic timidity on the part of the seventeenth-century translators. The phrase "the dawning of the day" in verse 9 should be "the eyelids of the dawn." Faced with a bold and striking metaphor, they apparently were unable to imagine how the dawn could have eyelids, and so they erased the figure entirely ― as, alas, many modern translations continue to do.

The canonical English version certainly contains strong poetry, but it is a loose kind of poetry in which the rhythm often goes slack. The beginning of verse 9, "Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark," involves an unnecessary proliferation of syllables and words, even in seventeenth-century usage, to represent three Hebrew words, three beats. The translators could easily have rendered this as "Let its twilight stars be dark." The fact that they did not may reflect a fondness for orotundity, a kind of eloquence perhaps more rhetorical than poetic.

In the next verse, an awkwardly extraneous word is the consequence of their commitment to absolute literalism: "Because it did not shut up the doors of my mother's womb." The Hebrew says simply "my womb," but since Job could not have a womb, the obvious meaning is the womb he inhabited for nine months, which of course was his mother's. This minor difficulty could have been obviated by translating the phrase as "the doors of the womb," but because the Hebrew noun shows a first-person possessive suffix, the translators felt obliged to represent it, adding the awkward "mother's" in italics to indicate that it is a word merely implied in the Hebrew.

Verse 11 is an example both of the splendid felicity of the 1611 translation and of its lapses into ungainliness. The Hebrew has four words in the first half the line and just three in the second half, with four beats against three. The English rendering of the first half of the line could scarcely be surpassed: "Why died I not from the womb?" These seven monosyllabic words, with three accents, perfectly convey the forceful compactness of the Hebrew. As a translator, I envy the freedom of my seventeenth-century predecessors to deploy the rhythmically concise inversion, "died I not," where modern usage compels one to settle for "did I not die."

But in the second half of the line, the translation becomes unhinged: "Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?" The entire clause is arhythmic, and it offers a full sixteen words for the three in the Hebrew. This version reflects a certain literalist impulse of clarification ― note the supplying of the italicised "why" and "not," which are quite unnecessary ― and though "give up the ghost" is a fine old phrase, there surely are more compact English synonyms for dying.

It is hard to resist the inference that the King James translators often relished the proliferation of words, a stylistic habit that could generate a kind of eloquence. Here, however, as in other places, we see this eloquence become antithetical to the original.

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It has not been my intention to expose the stylistic beauty of the King James Version as merely a long-standing cultural delusion. The impressive power of the canonical English Bible is surely secure, and it continues both to nourish us as readers and to provide a wealth of resources for English writers. My argument has been rather that we all tend to remember books selectively just as we remember almost everything else selectively. Having been moved by the lofty dignity, the poised cadences and the plain directness of the King James Version in many passages, we are inclined to imagine in recollection that the entire translation is like that.

In point of fact, the grandeur of the 1611 version is not infrequently interrupted by stylistic lapses, awkwardness and patches of gratuitous wordiness. Job 3:11, which we have looked at closely, is a microcosmic instance of the ups and downs of the King James Version, the first half of the line beautifully felicitous, the second half, a long stumble. But even when the translation is flawlessly eloquent, the nature of the eloquence is often quite different from the biblical original. It comes closest to the biblical style, as I tried to illustrate at the outset, in the narrative prose.

Its treatment of the poetry, on the other hand, owes its eloquent force sometimes to an echoing of the images and the formal configurations of the original, and sometimes, rather more often, to its transformation of the original into a different mode of expression that draws on indigenous English patterns of expression.

This amalgam of disparate cultures and styles resulted in a great many sublime passages that have illuminated the inner lives and enchanted the poetic ears of English speakers for four centuries. One particularly memorable instance is the 1611 rendering of the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile ― the sweetest of biblical poets ― whose writings are appended to the book of Isaiah. Let me cite just two verses, four lines of poetry, from the beginning of Isaiah 40. After a verse that is one of those left-footed moments involving two misconstructions ("Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem ... that her warfare is accomplished"), this is how the King James translators make the Hebrew poet sing in English:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

This is sonorous English poetry that lifts the spirit, as truly eloquent language can do. One readily sees how it helped inspire the soaring music of Handel's Messiah; how it, and passages like it, ignited answering sparks in the celebratory verse of Whitman, Hopkins and Hart Crane. Though the King James Bible may not be altogether what reverential recollection makes of it, after more than four hundred years its grand language still rings strong.

Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He has published many celebrated books on biblical literature, including The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible and, most recently, The Art of Biblical Translation. He has recently completed his three-volume translation of The Hebrew Bible.