A quirky dish

The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible has produced some great books. Almost all aspects have been covered: the general histories of Melvyn Bragg and Gordon Campbell ranged over the politics and history, while David Crystal’s Begat showed how its idioms and phrases have percolated through our language. Now, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Harold Bloom finishes the year by approaching the KJV as a work of art.
 
With a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, he shuffles between the original languages and a variety of English translations — Tyndale, the Geneva Bible and the King James itself. This approach makes for one of the book’s great strengths, namely the rich spread of quotation. It also gives us a chance to see how those famous phrases were worked through into their final form. Take that quartet of monosyllables, ‘a still small voice’, in 1 Kings 19, verse 12: we move from the Hebrew qol demmanah daqah (roughly ‘a voice of thin silence’) to Tyndale’s ‘a small still voice’, then the Geneva Bible’s ‘a still and soft voice’ until compressed into lapidary eloquence as ‘a still small voice’ in the KJV.