Now that we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible, I wonder if we can dispense with the notion that it has greatly influenced the shape of the English language. Macaulay once claimed that if every other book perished, the Bible ‘would alone suffice to show the whole extent’ of the beauty and power of English. But, as Gordon Campbell points out in his admirable new book Bible (Oxford, £16.99), one of the glories of Macaulay’s own style, the subordinate clause, is no feature of the Bible in the translation made in King James’s reign.
It follows the paratactic structure of Hebrew, with sentences piled up successively instead of involuted clauses, and this rather suits English. That is one of the reasons we find the language of the AV poetic. Another is its archaism.
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