Penguins on Parade: the King James Bible!

Some Penguin Classics seem like parts of an exceedingly natural progression, and what could feel more natural than to conclude our little mini-tour of great ancient texts with the King James Bible? And equally natural that Penguin Classics should publish a King James Bible, and yet they took their sweet time doing so, only finally producing one in 2006, this enormous hefty trade paperback edition edited by David Norton.

Before this volume, Penguin's dabblings in Biblical literature had been sporadic and incomplete: segments had been reproduced with no critical apparatus in the mighty Viking Portable World Bible, and the four Gospels of the New Testament had been given four intensely interesting volumes of commentary in the Pelican line, and a volume of Paul's letters had appeared, also laden with commentary, but while publisher after publisher produced a critically annotated Bible, Penguin held back. Until the appearance of this volume, the best such Bibles in the general market were the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 and the Oxford World's Classics Bible of 1997. And that's an apt echo as well, since until the appearance of the King James Bible in 1611, there were also two main contenders for the top spot, the Bishop's Bible of 1568 and the Geneva Bible of 1560. When King James I gave his command that "a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek," forty-four scholars set to work on separate sections and labored both under their own rather remarkable sense of literary perfectionism and also under the goad of the king, who clearly didn't want the whole project mired forever in academic hair-splitting.



The result, of course, was an unparalleled thing, a mightier achievement than a dozen Taj Mahals. The blood and grandeur of the Old Testament comes alive as in no previous English rendition:

Now the Philistines fought against Israel, and the men of Israel fled before the Philistines, and fell down slain in Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines followed hard after Saul, and after his sons, and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul. And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him, and he was wounded by the archers. Then said Saul to his armour-bearer, 'Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith, lest these uncircumscribed come and abuse me.' But his armour-bearer would not, for he was sore afraid. So Saul took a sword, and fell upon it. And when he armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell likewise on the sword, and died. So Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died together. And when all the men of Israel that were in the valley saw that they fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead. Then they forsook their cities, and fled, and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.

And likewise most of the much thinner, nervier beauty of the New Testament is made clear to the common reader:

And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, saying, 'Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witnesses against thee?' But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, 'Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' And Jesus said, 'I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, 'What need we any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think ye?' And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

And this Penguin Classic volume itself is also an amazing success, starting with Norton's simple, lucid Introduction, which makes a stirring case for the sheer worth of those forty-four scholars' work:

The King James Bible offers the reader both the meaning of the Bible and a religious or aesthetic experience of language that no modern translation can match. For instance, after Adam and Eve have eaten fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the King James Bible has Adam give this simple reply to God: 'And the man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (Gen. 3:12). The meaning is clear except perhaps for 'she gave me of the tree,' but in context it is obvious that he is saying she gave him fruit from the tree. The language is simple, almost entirely monosyllabic English, without a trace of pretence to grandeur. Only the archaic form, 'thou gavest' markes it out as biblical English.

Modern versions usually stay close to the King James in this verse. Here is the New International Version: 'The man said, "The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." It is still powerful, but not as powerful. There are no uncertainties of meaning, nor any archaism, but the rhythm has almost vanished, and there are several touches, all of them associated with a move from literal translation towards paraphrase, which make it less effective. The dash before 'she gave me' underlines the effect of having the subject stated twice  (as it is in the Hebrew), but it goes along with the changes that make Adam close to vindictive in his attitude to Eve. 'The woman you put here with me' is a bitter statement, as if Eve were inflicted on him. The sense of Eve as a gift is lost - 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me'; lost too is the parallel between Eve being given and Eve giving - 'she gave' (the Hebrew uses the same verb in both places). The change at the end of the verse, 'and I ate it', comes about not just because the New International Version, paraphrasing for clarity, has added 'some fruit' (not in the Hebrew), and so must finish with 'it' (again not in the Hebrew).

There's something refreshingly nuts-and-bolts about such a line of defense, and it's just the beginning of this volume's charms. There are plenty of excellent maps, and the end notes are a triumph, fully the complement of those Pelican commentary volumes of long ago. The stark elegance of the end product is reminiscent of the original appearance of the King James Bible, which was made to be both beautiful and useful, worth every penny of its cover price, as it were, loaded with extras that always take the breath away from museum-goers who view a copy on display.

Bible Study: The Second Book of Samuel!

Our text today is from II Samuel, from the infamous lust-story of David and Bathsheba. One balmy spring evening, David is strolling on his palace roof when he spots a beautiful woman bathing. He asked around about who she was (we're not told how; either he described her address to the people he asked, or else he dragged them up to the roof and pointed) and learned that she was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers in David's own army, under the command of Joab.

David sent flunkies to fetch her, and (presumably after saying hello, although David was a randy little bugger and the Bible is silent on the point) they slept together. Bathsheba later sent word to him that she was pregnant and that she was certain the child was his. So David promptly sent for Uriah; they sat and chatted about things in general, about the conduct of the ongoing war (those pesky Ammonites again). The Bible is silent on whether or not Uriah found it strange that he should be summoned out of the blue to gossip with the king, and what David did next is even stranger: he told Uriah to go home and relax for a bit, and he sent him away with a generous portion from the royal banquet tables.

David's motivation is obvious - if Uriah wasted no time in sleeping with Bathsheba, David could then claim the child was Uriah's and nobody would be the wiser. As starstruck as he is by Bathsheba's beauty, at this point in the story he's still trying to duck having anything more to do with her or the baby.

Unfortunately, Uriah didn't go home. He slept in camp in the palace yard, and when David summoned him and asked him (his exasperation can be imagined) why he didn't go home and take it easy for a bit, Uriah's dignity was ruffled: how could he live with himself if he want home and relaxed while his commander and all their men were still in the field, under arms, waging a war?

Nothing if not persistent, David tried again the next day ... more food, more wine, more chit-chatting, followed once again by urging Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife. And again Uriah refused, once more sleeping in camp at the palace. Commentators over the centuries have wondered if perhaps there wasn't more going on here than simple martial virtue. After all, David had hardly made a secret of the fact that he fancied the man's wife - if Uriah had heard of this, is it any wonder he didn't feel like cozying up to Bathsheba, drunk or sober?

Finally David had had enough:

Next morning, David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Station Uriah in the thick of the fight and then fall back behind him so that he may be struck down and die." Joab, then besieging the town, posted Uriah in a place where he knew there were fierce fighters. The men of the town sallied out and engaged Joab; the army suffered casualties, including some of David's bodyguard; and Uriah the Hittite was killed too.

When Joab got word of this, he sent a messenger to tell David what happened, and he prepared the messenger for a hostile reception (David by this point has something of an evil reputation for how he takes bad news), warning the man to make sure to tell David that Uriah the Hittite died in the day's fighting. And sure enough, when David hears news of the battle, the little hypocrite waxes wroth - until he's told about Uriah, at which point he almost comically calmed down and sent Joab a message saying, essentially, these things happen.

Either Bathsheba or David or both made a point of waiting out the bare minimum decent interval of mourning, and then they got married. Which might have been what they both wanted, but even so, the Bible tells us Yahweh wasn't happy about it.

It's hard to read into the story what might really have happened, although it's at least certain that at some point David changed his mind about what he wanted. At first, he made very pointed efforts to keep Uriah the Hittite alive and make him the baby's father. And when these attempts failed, David suddenly shifted his tactics and successfully got Uriah killed (and, in an especially cold little gesture worthy of King Claudius, had Uriah himself unknowingly carry the order for his own execution). What changed?

I think Bathsheba is the key. I think David was realizing two things during those days when he was trying to send Uriah home to his wife: first, that Uriah himself was a bit of a boob, and second, that David increasingly couldn't bear the thought of anybody being with Bathsheba but himself. I think the more he thought about her, the more he had to have her.

Still, he took an enormous risk. The people he asked about Bathsheba's identity, the flunkies he sent to fetch her, the palace servants he instructed to bear the royal banquet to this nobody's house, his army commander Joab, to whom he gave actual written instructions to connive at the murder of one of his own men ... right from the beginning, way too many people knew about this erotic fixation of David's, and that's surely our lesson for today: when pursuing another man's wife, discretion is everything. Without it, you run the risk of gossip, mutiny, and pissing off Yahweh.

Bible Study: The Book of Nehemiah!

Our text today is from the Book of Nehemiah:

When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened until the Sabbath was over. I stationed some of my own men at the gates so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day. Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods spent the night outside Jerusalem. But I warned them and said, "Why do you spend the night by the wall? If you do this again, I will lay hands on you." From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath. Then I commanded the Levites to purify themselves and go and guard the gates in order to keep the Sabbath day holy.

Remember me for this also, O my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love.

Nehemiah tells his own story in the book (aside from a couple of lines that refer to him in the third person and may therefore have migrated into this text from elsewhere, unless the whole thing is by somebody else whose authorial control slipped in those lines), the story of being at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes in the years after the destruction of the Great Temple at Jerusalem and the exile of the surviving Jews.

Artaxerxes notices that Nehemiah is unhappy and asks him why. Nehemiah tells him: he'd like to go to Jerusalem and rebuild the city and the city walls, since great chunks of both lay now in burned ruins. Nehemiah assures us that it was God Who put this idea in his head, but it sure doesn't seem that way - this is a guy who seems very likely to get things done all by himself (and besides, in the Old Testament, God's idea of gently persuading Artaxerxes would have been to fill him to overflowing with live maggots, not get Nehemiah to propose some urban renewal). Nehemiah likewise credits God with Artaxerxes' answer, which is a resounding 'yes.' The king authorizes the rebuilding and shields Nehemiah not only with letters of instruction to the local satraps and governors but also with an armed detachment.

The aforementioned governors don't like any measures that help the Jews, and so they grumble and threaten violence. And in a typical motif of the Old Testament, even the Jews' alleged benefactor grows disillusioned with the Chosen People - the above quote is just one among many in which Nehemiah wonders if the squawking, covetous, mercantile behavior of the people he invites back into the rebuilt city makes them unworthy of all the bother he's gone to. And the quote demonstrates another thing about Nehemiah, as we've said: he was entirely capable of getting the results he wanted all by himself. His invocations of God come across as pro forma ass-covering.

And the message of it all? Well, the Book of Nehemiah comes at the very end of the Jewish history parts of the Old Testament, when the shot and incident of the earlier books has died away almost completely, leaving nothing much more than standard ancient history. So it's possible God simply stopped caring about any of this human stuff in which he once took such a drastic and bombastic interest. He doesn't talk to Nehemiah at all, not even a terse 'good job.' And a few centuries after Nehemiah, when the Roman Vespasian, his two sons Titus and Domitian, and their right-hand-general Trajanus all sacked Jerusalem and burned the Great Temple, God didn't lift a pinky to stop it.

Still, even though he's seconded by no smiting or plaguing, Nehemiah has at least royal backing to get his various projects done. And those projects do get done - a lot more quickly and unambiguously than most Old Testament projects in which God is heavily involved. If there is a falling off, maybe it's mutually beneficial.

Bible Study: The Book of Joshua!

Our text today is from the Book of Joshua:

Yahweh drove them headlong before Israel, defeating them completely at Gibeon; furthermore, he pursued them toward the descent of Beth-horon and harassed them as far as Azekah, and as far as Makkedah. And as they fled from Israel down the descent of Beth-horon, Yahweh hurled huge hailstones from heaven on them all the way to Azekah, which killed them. More of them died under the hailstones than at the edge of Israel's sword. Then Joshua spoke to Yahweh, the same day that Yahweh delivered the Ammonites to the Israelites. Joshua declaimed:

"Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
and moon, you also, over the Vale of Aijalon."
And the sun stood still, and the moon halted,
till the people had vengeance on their enemies.

Is this not written in the Book of the Just? The sun stood still in the middle of the sky and delayed its setting for almost a whole day. There was never a day like that, before or since, when Yahweh obeyed the voice of a man, for Yahweh was fighting for Israel. Then Joshua, and all Israel with him, returned to the camp at Gilgal.

That's from the famous Chapter 10 of Joshua, famous for that bit about the sun refusing to set until the Israelites had had time to take vengeance on their enemies. The kings of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon have all marched with their armies against the city of Gibeon, which has just made a separate peace with Joshua, conqueror-king of the Israelites. Gibeon sends word to Joshua at Gilgal, begging him to come lift the siege.

Joshua is the most terrifying figure in the Jewish Bible. It's not just that he's grizzled with experience (he'd been a lieutenant of Moses, legendarily one of only two who were always steadfast in their bravery), although that's a part of it. And it's not just that he has the ear of Yahweh, clearly the most terrifying deity in Palestine (clear, that is, to everybody from random Canaanite prostitutes to most - though, obviously, not all - kings). It's that for one of the only times in the Old Testament, Yahweh has found a human who's a, God help us, kindred spirit.

Yahweh is as powerful as the gods of Olympus, but He has none of their counter-balancing sensuality. Nor does He have the grubby mundanity of the Norse deities. And the bizarre grace of those characters in the Mahabharata? Forget about it - that's the last thing Yahweh is. He's created this gigantic sandbox-world, and He's watched it populate with all kinds of people, and He's chosen one group of them to champion against all comers (sometimes - on alternate Tuesdays, those hailstones could easily have been pelting the Israelites). But he's a bit, shall we say, extreme.

In Joshua, he's found his Facebook soulmate. Because Joshua is a homicidal psychopath. When he catches the league of five kings by surprise (an odd thing for him to need to do, since Yahweh already told him he'd win - but then, Yahweh helps those who help themselves. Sometimes.) and puts them to flight (that bit about Yahweh throwing the gigantic hailstones is one of the only times anywhere in the Bible where any kind of specific physical action is attributed to Him)(He's more a remote-control kind of catastrophizer), he doesn't want to subdue them or teach them a lesson or even ransom them.

So they hole up in a cave, the five of them, and when Joshua's done slaughtering their armies (mention is made of only a few straggling survivors), he has them dragged out from their cave, he kills them (there's the strong implication that he does it personally), he hangs their bodies on trees for the afternoon, and then he tosses their remains back into the cave and seals it up with big rocks (we're told those rocks are still there to this day - the Book of Joshua often goes out of its way to assure us that its events can be independently verified - notice that allusion above to The Book of the Just, now lost).

And that's the end of that - or so you'd think! But no! You see, Joshua has one problem with the rest of Palestine: it still has people in it. Not just conspiring kings, and not just their armies, and not just able-bodied (and presumably grumbling) men - it still has anybody living in it. That irritates Joshua, as it would irritate any homicidal psychopath.

Unlike most homicidal psychopaths, however (cases like Joshua and Brigham Young are rare), Joshua had the full and fervent backing of a bloodthirsty god. That's the sort of thing that gets you results.

The rest of Chapter 10 is a record of those results. Joshua led his army into Makkedah and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Libnah and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Lachish and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Gezer and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Eglon and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Hebron and killed every single person living there. Then Joshua led his army to Debir and killed every single person living there. We get a wide-angle view:

Thus Joshua subdued the whole land: the highlands, the Negeb, the lowlands, the hillsides, and all the kings in them. He left not a man alive and delivered every single soul over to the ban, as Yahweh the God of Israel had commanded. Joshua conquered them from Kedesh-barnea to Gaza, and the whole region from Goshen as far as Gibeon. All these kings and their kingdoms Joshua mastered in one campaign, because Yahweh the God of Israel fought for Israel. And then Joshua, and all Israel with him, returned to the camp at Gilgal.

And plenty tired they were, no doubt. Systematic genocide, as any Nazi could tell you, is thirsty work.

Bible Study: The Book of Judith!

Our text today is from the Book of Judith:

I will sing a new song to my God.
Lord, you are great, you are glorious,
wonderfully strong, unconquerable.
May your whole creation serve you!
For you spoke and things came into being,
you sent your breath and they were put together,
and no one can resist your voice.

Should mountains topple
and mingle with the waves,
should rocks melt
like wax before your face,
to those who fear you,
you would still be merciful.

This is part the song Judith sings in celebration at the climax of her story, and she has every reason to celebrate, having single-handedly saved her city of Bethulia from the ravaging hordes of the invader.

The invader in this case is the mighty King Nebuchanezzar, lord of the Assyrian empire and self-styled king of all the world, who has sent his vast army under the command of General Holofernes into Israel and swept all opposition before him. The King did this despite the warning of Achior the Ammonite that it would be best not to disturb the Israelites, because you might thereby incur the wrath of their particularly nasty deity. Nebuchadnezzar doesn't take kindly to dissenting voices and banishes Achior to Israel, to suffer their fate right along with everybody else.

At first, the King seems to be right. The Israelites lament that their God isn't protecting them from the invading armies, and soon Bethulia is besieged. That brings Judith into the story: she's a beautiful young widow whose (henpecked, one suspects) husband died of heatstroke during a barley harvest, leaving her with property, servants, a nice house, and a spotless reputation. When Holofernes invades, she puts off her widow's weeds, dresses herself to perfection, and goes to his camp, telling him she's betraying her own people because they're wicked and obstreperous.
He'd have believed anything she said, of course, because he's jaw-droppingly besotted with her beauty from the first moment he sees her. This completely human trait is one of many Holofernes has; for a story's villain, he's surprisingly affable, as when he responds to Judith's comments about her own people:

"Courage, woman," Holofernes said, "do not be afraid. I have never hurt anyone who chose to serve Nebuchadnezzar, king of the whole world. Even now, if your nation of mountain dwellers had not insulted me, I would not have raised a spear against them. This was their fault, not mine. ... Courage! You will live through this night, and many after. No one shall hurt you."

Poor sap - too bad the same can't be said for him. Because of course Judith never intended to betray her own people, quite the opposite. After a brief enough stay in Holofernes' camp to cause everyone to let their guard down (including the eunuch Bagoas, whose job it is to watch over Judith while she's there) - the general even lets her eat her own specially-brought food, which she carries in - spoiler alert! - a big canvas sack - Judith lies in wait one night when Holofernes has had more wine than usual (he's working up his nerve to rape her, though she doesn't know that). With an imperiousness that comes through even the story's sparse narrative, she gets Bagoas to dismiss all the general's servants and take the night off himself, and she enters the tent of the passed-out Holofernes.

She takes his scimitar from his bedstead and with two mighty whacks cuts his head off. She then puts the head in her trusty canvas sack, stuffs the bed canopy in there too (no use leaving it, soaked with arterial spray to a height of nine feet, broadcasting to even the most casual onlooker what happened), and calmly makes her exit from the Assyrian camp.

When she shows the severed head to her people back in Bethulia, they fall on their knees with joy (well, except for wimpy Achior, who faints) (when he revives, he agrees to convert to the Israelite religion and is promptly circumcised, probably wishing he'd stayed fainted) - she predicts, correctly, that the Assyrians will fall to pieces when they find out what's happened to their mighty general, and when that happens, the Israelites drive the invaders from their land. We're told they knew peace for a long time afterwards.

And Judith? She was honored by her people and grew old in peace and prosperity. She lived to 105 and died in her bed (just like Holofernes, but you know what I mean).

And the lesson? To me it seems obvious: agnosticism is best. Despite Judith's elaborate praise to God in her "new song" (the first parts of which also slip in a lot of praise to herself), one of the most prominent features of her story is that God isn't in it; Judith doesn't get commanded by Him to kill Holofernes, and although she prays to Him for strength, the fact that she needs two whacks to decapitate her victim implies she had to rely on her own two arms, as the reader suspects all along. And really - given the rest of the Old Testament, can you imagine how much different the story would have unfolded, if God had been involved? In its present form, the Book of Judith is a tidy little story about one woman's plucky nationalism; Books where God takes an active hand are never neat. Had He been involved, Judith probably wouldn't have survived her own story - and if she had, she'd have been punished something awful for her success.

Nope, she did it all on her own: she reasoned, correctly, that the invading army would dissolve into chaos if it's head, so to speak, were cut off, and she resolved to do just that. And everything worked out fine, for her and the Israelites. All well and good to praise God after the fact, but the Book of Judith shows clearly that you really don't want Him involved while you're trying to get things done.

Bible Study: The Book of Hosea!

Our text today is from the Book of Hosea:

When Yahweh spoke first through Hosea, Yahweh said this to him, "Go marry a whore, and get children with the whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore for abandoning Yahweh."

So he went; and took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, who conceived and bore him a son ...

Hosea is one of the so-called minor prophets of the Old Testament (not really so minor, since God doesn't talk to just anybody, but nevertheless not in the big leagues where God actually gets chatty), and to him God gives just about the lousiest instructions He gives to anybody in the book: to make yourself a walking billboard, a living demonstration of how Israel isn't worthy of My love, act as My stand-in and go marry a faithless whore.

Of course Hosea has no choice but to obey (God is God, after all, He of the smiting and the afflicting-with-boils), but even so, he certainly musters some enthusiasm for the part. He instructs Gomer to name their first son Jezreel, a name which is meant to invoke God's intent to ruin Israel and end its reign (it would be like a father today naming his son "Chinese Debt"). And he instructs Gomer to name their second child "Unloved." And the third kid gets named "You're Not My People." So it's not just God who's ruining lives to make a point here.

The point is that Israel keeps straying from the steadfast compact with God (Hosea is the first to introduce the husband/wife metaphor for God/Israel - a metaphor that will get co-opted later on by the Catholic Church), and God's not happy about it, as the little book's verses make clear:

That is why, when the time comes, I will withdraw my corn
And my wine, when the season for it comes.
I will retrieve my wool, my flax,
That were intended to cover her nakedness;
So I will display her shame for her lover's eyes
And no one shall rescue her from my power.
I will lay her vines and fig trees waste,
Those of which she used to say:
"These are the pay my lovers gave me."
I am going to make them into thickets
for the wild beasts to ravage.
I will put an end to all her rejoicing,
Her feasts, her New Moons, her sabbaths,
And all her solemn festivals.
I mean to make her pay for all the days
When she burned offerings to the Baals
And decked herself with rings and necklaces
To court her lovers,
forgetting me.
It is Yahweh who is speaking.

No offense, but that final line surely isn't necessary: nobody in the Bible, Hell, nobody in all literature, has a worse (or more elaborately detailed) temper than Yahweh.

And the point? That despite Hosea's extreme bitterness at having a wife who strays from him (although she faithfully bears him children, she habitually falls back into her whorish ways, at one point even needing Hosea to buy her back into his household), he keeps taking her back (in defiance of Jewish law, even); that despite how faithless Israel habitually is to her God, despite how bitter He is about it, reconciliation is still possible.

That and, of course, that it really, really doesn't pay to be one of God's prophets.

Books! The GOOD book!

We hear at Stevereads hope someday to write as rattling good a yarn as the Bible. It really is the trump, as Bertie Wooster (or Sebastian, if you want to bring in fictional characters) might say: it's got romance (though doomed and too often fraught with leprosy), action (including feats of espionage, derring-do, and high adventury, a disproportionate number of which deal with leprosy), a healthy bracing of moral precepts (including how badly you have to screw up to get leprosy), and a helpful smattering of hygiene tips (leprosy again). Considering its perennial spot atop the international bestseller lists, anybody could be forgiven for wishing they'd written it themselves. Even J.K. Rowling, it may be somewhat doubtingly proposed, must envy God.

Still, He gets the credit: the Earth, the Heavens, Sudoku, and ... the greatest book of 'em all.

Of course Biblical scholars (including my esteemed colleague Bathsheba) will say the Bible isn't, in fact, a book - that it's a compendium of books, a library between two covers. As such, it would seem to call for a brace of entirely different, entirely separate translators, each slaving away on their separate works. Alas, this wonderfully various Bible (a spectacular IDEA, in case any of the publishing hotshots who routinely monitor this site are wondering whom to credit with it) has yet to be made, so we're left with all the other efforts out there - from the almost unbelievable, heroically solitary efforts of errant individuals (William Tyndale and Desiderius Erasmus, take a bow!) to the austere corporate board-members throughout the ages who've come together, sometimes under uncomfortably intense scrutiny, to do the job together. The original texts are an almost unbelievable mish-mash, especially if you're trying to be philologically trustworthy to them all, and even moreso if some of them are linguistically impenetrable to you personally. Erasmus, for instance, tried very hard to wrap his mind around Hebrew (well, tried as hard as he was inclined to, which, after three ages of Latin and, gawd help us, ancient Greek, might not have been all that much), but he ended up relying more than was perhaps seemly on previous dog-eared Latin translations of the Old Testament.

There are about six humans alive on the planet today who can read up on the Bible in all its original texts and incarnations. Everybody else - including, we suspect, all you loyal ewoks out there reading this entry - have to rely on the artificial products of other brains.

And such an array of artificial products! Bibles are a growth industry like no other in publishing, with shelf upon shelf of different choices before the wary potential reader.

Most of these choices aren't really choices at all, just infinite permutations on the current fad of boneheaded niche-penetration: the black woman's Bible, the teen Bible, the lesbian Bible, the diabetic's Bible, ad nauseum. Also, a vast number of Bibles in bookstores today - especially those spawned and embraced by American evangelism - can scarcely be called Bibles at all, they've been so bowdlerized and contemporized and simplified (all with the goal in mind of making the Bible a COMFORTABLE book, something it never has been and never could be).

No, what we're really talking about here is SCHOLARLY EDITIONS of the Bible, for readers who want to take it seriously as a work (or many works) of literature. Some of you will know that we here at Stevereads have an abiding preference for the venerable King James version, its rolling cadences of gorgeous prose and verse still as thunderously good as when they were first assembled.

But we realize that some of those rolling cadences will sound a trifle archaic to the modern ear, and so we recommend the Jerusalem Bible, our candidate for the best of all 'modern' Bibles.

La Bible de Jerusalem was first published in French and given a definitive accompanying English translation in 1966, long before any of us were born. It has generous notes and maps and introductions and critical apparati, all of which will be a boon to modern readers. But the main thing we here at Stevereads like about it, naturally enough, is the clean, dignified sweep of its freshened prose. Modern readers have enough obstacles to enjoying the Bible as a work (or many works) of literature - surely grappling with Jacobean syntax should be left to the real enthusiasts.

Here are a few examples, to give you all a better idea of what kind of differences we're talking about. Take this helpful injunction, from that laff-riot of a book, Deuteronomy:

"When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one of them intervenes to protect her husband from the other's blows by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut her hand off and show no pity."

Here's the corresponding passage in the good old King James:

"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one putteth forth her hand and taketh him by the secrets, then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

Or take another example, this one from a New Testament assurance made by Jesus:

"Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light."

Here's the King James:

"Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Of course, no amount of modernizing can 'improve' on perfection, and sometimes the King James is simply perfect. So although we here at Stevereads heartily recommend the Jerusalem Bible the next time it crosses your path in a used bookstore, we'll end this long-delayed entry with a comparison in which it's conspicuously the loser. We're fickle that way.

From the Jerusalem Bible:

Yahweh is my shepherd,
I lack nothing.

In meadows of green grass he lets me lie.
To waters of repose he leads me;
There he revives my soul.

He guides me by paths of virtue
for the sake of his name.

Though I pass through a gloomy valley,
I fear no harm;
beside me your rod and staff
are there, the hearten me.

You prepare a table before me
under the eyes of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil,
my cup brims over.

Ah, how goodness and kindness pursue me,
every day of my life;
my home, the house of Yahweh,
as long as I live!

And the King James:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies
Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.