The KJV also abounds in inaccuracies, especially for the Hebrew, because there have been enormous advances in the understanding of the biblical language since the seventeenth century, and even in its time such understanding was rather uneven in Christian Hebraist circles in comparison with the medieval and early modern Hebrew exegetes. And there is a further problem with the KJV that probably goes unnoticed by most readers, or at least is not consciously noticed. The seventeenth-century version is famously eloquent (as its twentieth-century successors egregiously are not), but the eloquence is more intermittent than we usually choose to remember. By and large, the KJV does very well with the narrative prose, in part because it emulates biblical syntax and diction, and some of its renderings of the poetry are splendid. Yet many lines of verse stumble into arrhythmic sprawls, sometimes using three or four times as many words and syllables as the beautifully compact and strongly cadenced Hebrew. This is an intrinsic structural defect that one has to live with. Also in the poetry, the KJV sometimes deploys polysyllabic Latinate terms with a certain ecclesiastical burnish (the translators were, after all, clergymen) that are alien to the concrete directness of the Hebrew. At least semantically, these are susceptible to correction through annotation, something that Herbert Marks often does.

The framework of the Norton Critical Editions, a series that has provided a valuable college classroom resource for decades, becomes in the hands of these three extremely able editors the occasion for rescuing the King James Version for general use and for serious study. The Norton Critical Editions of major literary texts aim to make them accessible—but not through the strategy of “Green up!”—by offering critically informed introductions, annotations of unfamiliar terms and significant allusions, and generous appendices that include source materials for the works, contemporaneous reviews, modern critical assessments, and other relevant documents. In all these respects, the editors of this new KJV have taken the format of the Norton Critical Edition and raised it to the second mathematical power. Whereas the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick or Crime and Punishment has one or two brief notes on a page and sometimes no notes for several pages, every page of the Norton Critical KJV is crowded with annotation, and often the notes are quantitatively far more of a page than the biblical text proper is. In this respect, as well as in the appended materials, it entirely eclipses the sundry “study Bibles” now in circulation.

What is accomplished through the generous annotation is quite remarkable. First, the notes offer a succinct guide to the precise meanings of seventeenth-century English words. Terms that have become somewhat archaic or altogether obsolete are helpfully glossed: many readers are liable to think that “froward” is a typo, so the term is explained; others probably need to be informed that “ward” means “custody,” that “wotteth not” means “give no thought to,” that “meat” is a general term for food and does not imply having come from a butcher shop. Using such annotations is hardly onerous: confronted with a linguistic perplexity, you glance down the page and can immediately see what is going on in the English of the translation.

Another pervasive issue addressed in the notes is mistakes in construing the original. The KJV abounds in misunderstandings of the original, many of them minor but some of them real howlers. When, for example, the King James translators at Job 3:8 have “who are ready to raise up their mourning,” they have badly mistaken livyatan, or “leviathan,” for an exclusively post-biblical homonym that actually means “funeral.” Herbert Marks discreetly and succinctly corrects the error, going on to explain in a few words Leviathan’s role in Canaanite mythology. The process of correcting the errors of the King James Version began in 1885 with the Revised Standard Version, but tinkering with the language of the 1611 version and slightly modernizing it were concomitant with taking away more than a little of its stylistic grandeur, and the use of corrective annotation seems a wiser strategy.