The other two determining influences must be spoken of now.The third lies in the fact that the English language was still plastic.It had not fallen into such hard forms that its words were narrow or restricted.The truth is that from the point of view of pure literature the Bible is better in English than it is in Greek or Hebrew.That is, the English of the King James version as English is better than the Greek of the New Testament as Greek.As for the Hebrew there was little development for many generations; Renan thinks there was none at all.The difference comes from the point of time in the growth of the tongue when the Book was written.The Greek was written when the language was old, when it had differentiated its terms, when it had become corrupted by outside influence.The English version was written when the language was new and fresh, when a word could be taken and set in its meaning without being warped from some earlier usage.The study of the Greek Testament is always being complicated by the effort to bring into its words the classical meaning, when so far as the writers of the New Testament were concerned they had no interest in the classical meaning, but only in the current meaning of those words.In the English language there was as yet no classical meaning; it was exactly that meaning that these writers were giving the words when they brought them into their version.[1] There is large advantage in the fact that the age was not a scientific one, that the language had not become complicated.So it becomes interesting to observe with Professor March that ninety-three per cent.of these words, counting also repetitions, are native English words.The language was new, was still plastic.It had not been stiffened by use.It received its set more definitely from the English Bible than from any other one work--more than from Shakespeare, whose influence was second.
[1] Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, p.54,The fourth fact which helped to determine its English style is the loyalty of the translators to the original, notably the Hebrew.It is a common remark of the students of the original tongues that the Hebrew and Greek languages are peculiarly translatable.That is notable in the Hebrew.It is not a language of abstract terms.The tendency of language is always to become vague, since we are lazy in the use of it.We use one word in various ways, and a pet one for many ideas.Language is always more concrete in its earlier forms.In this period of the concrete English language, then, the translation was made from the Hebrew, which was also a concrete, figurative language itself.The structure of the Hebrew sentence is very simple.There are no extended paragraphs in it.It is somewhat different in the New Testament, where these paragraphs are found, certainly in the Pauline Greek; but even there the extended sentences are broken into clauses which can be taken as wholes.The English version shows constantly the marks of the Hebrew influence in the simplicity of its phrasing.Renan says that the Hebrew "knows how to make propositions, but not how to link them into paragraphs." So the earlier Bible stories are like a child's way of talking.They let one sentence follow another, and their unity is found in the overflowing use of the word "and"--one fact hung to another to make a story, but not to make an argument.In the first ten chapters of I Samuel, for example, there are two hundred and thirty-eight verses; one hundred and sixty of them begin with AND.There are only twenty-six of the whole which have no connective word that thrusts them back upon the preceding verse.
In the Hebrew language, also, most of the emotions are connected either in the word used or in the words accompanying it with the physical condition that expresses it.Over and over we are told that "he opened his mouth and said," or, "he was angry and his countenance fell." Anger is expressed in words which tell of hard breathing, of heat, of boiling tumult, of trembling.We would not trouble to say that.The opening of the mouth to speak or the falling of the countenance in anger, we would take for granted.The Hebrew does not.Even in the description of God you remember the terms are those of common life; He is a shepherd when shepherds are writing; He is a husbandman threshing out the nations,treading the wine- press until He is reddened with the wine--and so on.That is the natural method of the Hebrew language--concrete, vivid, never abstract, simple in its phrasing.The King James translators are exceedingly loyal to that original.
Professor Cook, of Yale, suggests that four traits make the Bible easy to translate into any language: universality of interest, so that there are apt to be words in any language to express what it means, since it expresses nothing but what men all talk about; then, the concreteness and picturesqueness of its language, avoiding abstract phrases which might be difficult to reproduce in another tongue; then, the simplicity of its structure, so that it can be taken in small bits, and long complicated sentences are not needed; and, finally, its rhythm, so that part easily follows part and the words catch a kind of swing which is not difficult to imitate.That is a very true analysis.The Bible is the most easily translated book there is, and has become the classic for more languages than any other one book.It is brought about in part in our English version by the faithfulness of the translators to the original.
