Product Description

The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization, and also the most difficult to interpret. It has been the vehicle of continual conflict, with every interpretation reflecting passionately-held views that have affected not merely religion, but politics, art, and even science. This unique edition offers an exciting new approach to the most influential of all English biblical texts - the Authorized King James Version, complete with the Apocrypha. Its wide-ranging Introduction and the substantial notes to each book of the Bible guide the reader through the labyrinth of literary, textual, and theological issues, using the most up-to-date scholarship to demonstrate how and why the Bible has affected the literature, art and general culture of the English-speaking world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24535 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1824 pages

Frank Kermode
"The World's Classics Bible [is] a quite extraordinary success. It is learned but entirely accessible, full of fascinating information ... and executed with great skill and enthusiasm"

Review
The World's Classics Bible [is] a quite extraordinary success. It is learned but entirely accessible, full of fascinating information ... and executed with great skill and enthusiasm (Frank Kermode )

[The editors] seem to have read everything ... and their commentary consistently illuminates everything it touches upon, from the meaning of single words to the largest issues ... A magnificent achievement (Gabriel Josipovici )

About the Author
Robert Carroll has taught Semitic languages and the Hebrew/English Bible for 30 years at Glasgow University, where he is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies.
Stephen Prickett has held the Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra, and has taught at Sussex and Minnesota Universities and Smith College, Massachusetts. He is currently Regius Professor of English Literature at Glasgow University.

Customer Reviews

A Little Objectivity Please!
What is the point of reviewing The King James Bible according whether you consider it to be true or not?! Anyone thinking of reading the Bible, in whatever translation, are doing so for their own reasons: whether because they believe it to be the Word of God; or because it is great literature and one of the cornerstones of our Western / English speaking society.

Translations do make a big difference, however. Having done a degree in Theology and studied the Bible in its original languages, I am still amazed to find how much difference the choice of one word over another can make. The influences of the people who translated the particluar version of the Bible have a big influence on the meaning that is put across.

The King James Bible was written in England as a result of the Reformation. It was the first translation of the Bible into English (before that the Latin version had been used by the clergy). The language is undeniably beautiful, very rich and powerful. Recitation of selected texts is a particularly beneficial exercise.

If it is comprehension you are looking for, however, a modern translation may be more helpful. The New Internationalist Version is very good, but sacrifices some of the beauty for the sake of clarity (as do all modern translations)

As a religious work and as literature
The Holy Bible ("Book divine! Precious treasures thou art mine!"--to recall a popular hymn) like many great works of religion can be taken on two levels. The first is as literature, the second as the revealed word of God.

As far as literature goes, the King James Version, "translated out of the original tongues" during the time of Shakespeare some four hundred years ago has been since its inception the standard by which all other versions are compared. More than that, along with the works of Shakespeare, the King James Version of the Bible is the bedrock upon which all English literature rests. The language used by those anonymous translators ranges from the mundane to ethereal poetry of the highest order. If you are reading the Bible as literature, the King James version is the one to get. More than that, one can hardly be considered educated without at least some familiarity with this great work.

As far as the Bible being the revealed word of God, there are two possible ways of looking at it.

One, literally; that is, the Bible as the absolute, denotative truth put down by scribes acting as instruments of God. This is the way Christian fundamentalists view the Bible. "God said it. I believe it. That settles it!" (To recall a bumper sticker.)

Two, symbolically; that is, the Bible as wisdom from God set forth in symbol, parable, story, myth and metaphor.

To be blunt, I don't think there is much to be said for the literal approach. In the first place, the Bible is contradictory in many places and it requires some clever babbling to reconcile the contradictions. For example it is written in many places that the Lord was moved to anger by the misbehavior of his people. Indeed in Kings 17:18 it is reported: "Therefore, the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight." A God that gets angry would seem to be not much of a God and cannot reasonably be reconciled with the all-knowing, all-powerful being seen elsewhere in the Bible. Attributing anger to God is a pathetic anthropomorphic projection. There is a lot of this silliness in all religions of course.

But more than that, the Bible itself clearly indicates in many places that a literal expression is not what is meant. Thus Jesus spoke in parables ("And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables..." Matthew 22:1) and often used metaphorical language ("Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" Matthew 7:3). Clearly a literal meaning was not intended.

Because of these considerations the Bible is not taken literally by most practicing Christians. Consequently the "seven days" of creation can be seen as a metaphor for Big Bang cosmology (if one likes), and the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for human nature before we acquired consciousness.

The Bible can also be seen as psychological truth. All great religious works that have come down to us are repositories of psychological truth. They have survived partly because people have found them valuable in their daily lives. Regardless of literal truth they are psychologically true. It is a good psychology, for example, to "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Or, "neither cast ye your pearls before swine." And it is a great psychological, as well as a moral, truth that "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this the law and the prophets." (We are in Matthew 7 where Jesus speaks with especial eloquence.)

How does the Bible compare to the other great religious works? is a question worth considering. Certainly it is longer than the most famous works of other religions such as The Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus or the Tao Te Ching of the Taoists, although not much longer than the Koran. It is much more uneven than any of these, speaking in a multitude of voices from the begets of the Old Testament and the sublime poetry of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms to the eloquence and wisdom of Jesus in the New Testament. One would need to take all the Vedas, for example, from the hymns of the Brahmans to Krishna's expression in the Gita to find something comparable, and indeed there are many similarities.

In one sense all religious works of any antiquity are similar in that they are written in a symbolic and metaphorical language. If they were not they would not survive because the literal concerns of one age are not that of another, and furthermore, it is impossible to express many of the great psychological truths in a strictly denotative way. Even more than that, it is perhaps best to express these truths in a general way so that each of us may discover them ourselves as they relate to the challenges of our lives. Thus it is said that "Many are called but few are chosen" (Matthew 22:14). Called to what? Chosen for what? Jesus was referring to wedding guests, but this passage speaks to us of spiritual matters.

As does the Bible itself, properly understood.

Complete, Accessible and Objective
This is an ideal edition for someone with no prior knowledge of the Bible, who is interested in it as a work of literature and for its influence on subsequent literature, philosophy and art.

As has been pointed out by other reviewers, the editors' commentary approaches the text from a higher critic's, and not a fundamentalist's, point-of-view. The Authorized Version is put in its historical and literary context, and the original documents are criticised and discussed from a non-partisan perspective, as one would criticise any other collection of ancient texts. They do not mince their words about the "hard passages": the numerous rapes, bloody murders, and ethnic cleansings, and the issue of Christian antisemitism is not avoided.

The commentary is not voluminous: the majority of this formidable brick of a book is made up of the 1611 text itself, printed on thicker-than-usual paper for bibles; the commentary occupies less than a centimetre out of this tome's two inches plus. However it is enough to guide one through their reading (make that skim-reading in the case of the extensive genealogies, censuses, lists of laws, and instructions for constructing temples and curing lepers).

The text is absolutely complete, containing not only the Apocrypha (Deuterocanonical books) but the original lengthy preface by the translators, offering a defence of a new translation of the Word of God into the English tongue.

As the Introduction says, the Bible is the basic book of "our" [i.e. Western, Christian] civilization. Yet to begin at the beginning we are confronted with stories about people whose wealth was measured in donkeys and camels.

What you have in its pages is the very beginning of Christianity, and the foundation on which was built the philosophy and literature of all Christian culture for two thousand years. It is the beginning but not the end, and it is (at times) interesting to read through these simple, humble, and at times bewildering stories, and meandering and confusing treatises and contrast them to the rigor and elaborateness of Christian philosophy and theology and the majesty and strength of Christian art.