The English of our Bible

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven, Psalm 119:89.

My sister kindly alerted me to a link on Facebook in which the 23rd Psalm was compared in Early English 800-1066, Middle English 1000-1500, 1611, and 1989. The compiler of these four renditions of the 23rd Psalm did not appear to have an axe to grind.

All too often such comparisons are done to justify making new translations. This particular piece took advantage of the fact that the bible is one of very few texts from England in which the various early languages of England could be used to compare differences over a 1500 year span.

The title to the document is misleading. It says, How English has changed over the last 1000 years: The 23rd Psalm. What is called Early English is not English other than it was a Germanic Language with varying dialects spoken in the various Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England at that time.

For its Early English example of Psalm 23 it reads:

Drihtenme raet, ne byth me nanes godes wan,

And he geset on swythe good feohland.

And Fedde me be waetera Stathum.

In the time frame for the language we call Early English 800-1066, you can see that it is not the same language that we speak today. It is when we get to Middle English that the language becomes more recognizable. I doubt that a person from the year 800 could have understood a person from the year 1066. There were hundreds of languages in the British Isles during that period of time, similar to the multitude of languages in India or the Philippines today, or North America in the year 1400.

Those languages varied from various Celtic Languages to various Germanic Languages and even Norse Languages. As late as the 1930s, there were English School children who upon going to the public school realized that the school didn't speak the language of their village. Read Melvin Bragg's excellent book, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. He recounts his own and others' experiences about coming out of obscure villages to a public school.

There are a few translations of small portions of scripture, especially the psalms that date back to some form of Middle English. They appear in the various dialects of the monasteries in which they were translated. They were made as aids to priests of the time who themselves would have spoken one or more of the many languages spoken in the various Anglo Saxon Kingdoms.

Middle English

Our Lord gouerneth me, and nothying shal defailen to me

In the sted of pastur he sett me ther.

He norishissed me upon water of fyllyng.

Middle English refers to the period of time from the last of the Saxon kings of England, Norman the conquerer and the Plantagenet (French Norman) rulers over the English People, and the subsequent acceptance of using the native tongue by the king's court. From the time of the Norman invasion until the mid 1300s Norman French was the language of the court and of law.

Meanwhile, the tongue of the common people continued to change as it absorbed the tongues of their Norman French conquerors and of the Vikings who had in previous centuries invaded and who had subsequently settled large swaths of England. My name for example which is currently spelled Asquith comes from the Old Norse word for ash wood, Ask Withr. It described an area of England wherein the Viking invaders were predominant and named the areas around them after their own tongue.

Middle English borrowed heavily from the Norman tongue. A peasant would raise a sheep, but the Lord of the castle ate mutton. The peasant hunter might kill a dear, but his lord ate venison. A peasant might raise a cow, but his lord ate beef. Slowly, the various dialects and tongues of each district of England began to shape themselves into a new language which was still Germanic in nature but heavily borrowed from the two conquering cultures, Norman and Old Norse.

What we know of today as Middle English has survived because it was the dialect of London and therefore of the court and of the universities. Even early copies of the Wycliffe Bible vary by the dialect of the person copying it. No two read the same.

As L M Myers said in his book, The Roots of Modern English, medieval copyists never felt an obligation to copy a text word for word. They copied as they saw fit. That is why there are no two copies of the Wycliffe Bible that read the same.

What appears online today when you look up the Wycliffe Bible is not a copy of any of the existing 180 copies or portions of the Wycliffe Bible that have survived. It the work of two scholars named Forshall and Madden who in 1854 picked through the existing manuscripts and portions of manuscripts while piecing together a manuscript that made the Wycliffe Bible appear to be a translation of the Jerome Text of the Latin Bible. There is not one existing manuscript of the Wycliffe Bible that reads like their concoction.

By 1500, the War of the Roses was settled and England was under the rule of strong monarchs who could make their will known throughout the realm. The language of the London Court had taken the preeminence over all other dialects of which their were many. A new language began to form which we call Early Modern English. It became the delight of scholars, authors, and poets to realize that their native language was a rich language that lent itself well to the expression of thought. Prior to that, serious literature was written in French or Latin.

By becoming a written language, and by it being the language of the court, English as we know it today began to stabilize. By 1600 works such as Shakespeare began to be written that are still used 400 years later. Shakespeare shows us how the common man spoke. He wrote in the vernacular because he made his living by the sale of tickets to common people.

Shakespeare did not write in King James English. For example, Shakespeare wrote, "A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool". In King James English that would have read, A fool thinketh himself to be wise, but a wise man knoweth himself to be a fool. Only about one third of Shakespeare's verbs used the "th" ending. When he did, it was for effect, not because it was the language of the streets of London.

1611

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.

The King James translators had a task to do. They had to agree upon a form of English to which they could all subscribe. It was not the language of the court, nor the language of the people. Read Milton or Sir Walter Raleigh and see that for yourself.

They utilized the existing vocabulary of the English, but created a grammar which included inflected pronouns, conjugated verbs and other nuances of language that made it reflective of the Hebrew and Greek from which it was translated. By doing so they allowed their readers to hear the thoughts of God expressed in the same format in which the prophets and apostles had written them.

From its introduction in 1611 and throughout every generation of English speakers, the readers of the King James Bible have had to discipline themselves to read a timeless form of English that no generation had ever spoken naturally. By 1700, there were already church men complaining that the King James Bible was out of touch with modern usage.

What they missed was that the King James Bible was never in touch with the modern usage of any age. It has always required the reader to discipline himself to think exact thoughts in a firm grammatical setting that imparted thought exactly. For 400 years, churchmen, educators, and common people were content to subject themselves to that discipline to be able to read God's word in its purest form.

That has not set well with the Youtube watching, microwave cooking, leisure loving generation. With that in mind, let us look at the last sample given, the 1989 version of the 23rd psalm. I was not able to find exactly what translation it was from.

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing

He lets me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me to still waters.

Think about the phrase, "He lets me lie down". Now think of these two phrases, "my parents made me take a nap"; or "my parents let me take a nap". They are not saying the same thing. The 1611 says; He maketh me to lie down.

"He leads me to the still waters". Where are the still waters according to the sample 1989 reading? They are in front of me. Now look at the 1611 “He leadeth me beside the still waters", where are the waters? They are beside me as a travel. Two different shepherds are being described. One leaves it up to the sheep when to lay down and rest. The other shepherd makes them lie down on his schedule. One shepherd leads sheep to the water, the other leads them along beside the water.

Which shepherd is most likely to keep his flock safe and healthy, the one who lets them rest willy nilly, and occasionally leads them to water, or the shepherd who knows when they all need to lie down and when he leads them, there is always water available?

Those who find this all too picky have no idea how exact a King James Bible is and just how pure it is in its teaching. English is spoken differently all over the world. Thanks to the labors and ingenuity of the 1611 translators, there is one standard to which all English Speaking people can gather, the King James Bible. It is different from how they spoke and has always been different from how any generation in any time period spoke. Yet, I have never run across people who could not easily learn to read it, and who were not edified by learning its vocabulary.