The New American Bible

Abstract

Literature at Cornell University> is a Rutgers alumnus of the class of i8ç6y and has long been a Friend of the Rutgers Library.His commentary on the new American version of the Bible follows up a famfhlet he wrote on "Certain Rhythms in the English Bible" reviewed in the Journal in Decembery 1952.T HE COSTLY, "new," and overrated "American" version of the Bible which has been freely advertised (beginning, say, with the New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 12, 1953) suffers from a bad defect, not new at all, that already had become traditional.For the Bible, it may be reckoned as at least some seventy or eighty years of age.The defect, lurking in the frequent changes to a supposedly novel wording, is simply the lack of rhythm.Virtually all the recent renderings of the Bible that have been brought to public attention suffer in the same respect.The translators from 1870 to 1885, and translators from then down to our own time, seem never to have studied the cadences of good English prose, or any other ; and seemingly never studied anything on the rhythms of the English Bible.These rhythms grew up in a long tradition, but may be called the work of William Tindale (more than anybody else), who began to publish his translation in 1525.The rhythms of Tindale, Coverdale, and their predecessors were taken over by the scholars who translated the Bible into English at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, under stimulation from King James, to give the English-speaking people the so-called "Authorized" Version of 1611.This version really marks the culminating point in a process of revision and improvement that had been going on for something like a thousand years, from the time of the Venerable Bede through Wyclif down to the days of James.Since then, in some three hundred years, for the ordinary reader the changes called for by the advance of scholarship, that is, necessary changes in the meaning, are relatively few, and for such a reader, mostly of no importance; it is better for him doubtless to read "adder's den" for "cockatrice's den" in Isaiah 11.10: "And the weanèd child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den"-though "the cockatrice's den" makes a better cadence than

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