My Bible

CHAIR: Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me enormous pleasure to be able to introduce Dr David Daniell as our ‘My Bible’ speaker this evening. Dr Daniell was for 25 years in charge of Shakespeare studies at the University of London University College and he is now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of London and also an Honorary Fellow of two Oxford colleges, Hertford and St Catherine’s. He is the author of ten books and over 80 journal essays, mainly on Shakespeare but also on the English Bible. Indeed, over the last few years the English Bible has been the focus of Dr Daniell’s work.

 

He published a groundbreaking, modern spelling edition of Tyndale’s Bible, both the New and the Old Testaments, in the early ’90s. That was followed by a biography of William Tyndale which elicited such words as ‘stunning’, ‘compelling’ and ‘masterpiece’ from the critics. I don’t know if any of you went to the Tyndale exhibition at the British Museum which marked the 400^th anniversary of his birth, but David also curated that. That exhibition actually went to America and it has probably been seen by a quarter of a million people in the English-speaking world.

 

He is speaking tonight on story-telling in the English Bible and I am only sorry that his magnum opus, which is coming out this summer on This History of the English Bible was not out in time for us to help launch it at Jewish Book Week because I think it is going to be an absolutely definitive study of a very, very fascinating subject.

 

So I am going to hand over immediately to Dr Daniell to speak on ‘Storytelling in the English Bible’. Thanks very much.

 

DAVID DANIELL: Thank you Marion. It is wonderful to be here and thank you all for coming. I am going to talk for 30 minutes and 30 seconds on the 3^rd day of the 3^rd month of the third millennium. It must mean something!

 

I want to talk about how Hebrew first got into English and about the skills revealed in ‘Englishing’ Hebrew narrative. There have been several thousand translations into English of all or parts of the Bible in the last four, almost five, centuries. That is a figure that always staggers people. The Bible in English has been the world’s best seller since the early 19^th century and the qualities of that English should matter. Some of the translations are noble. Some of those 3,000 are trash. Some, even among the greatest sellers with one of them topping 10 million, though claiming to be from the original text are fraudulent.

 

My interest is in the English. I learned Hebrew as an extra subject to theology in Oxford as an undergraduate fifty years ago. It has slipped right away. I have worked with modern Hebrew scholars who have helped me a great deal. But my chief interest is in the English.

 

We need here some history, which I am sure you know. Hebrew was unknown in England until the 1530s. England was late in developing several important things. The new Renaissance humanism from Italy led to exploration there of original classical and biblical texts. The religious reformation challenged the iron grip of the Roman Catholic Church with the reformers’ insistence that the Bible in Greek and Hebrew came first, before what was decreed by what they called ‘that usurper’, the Pope in Rome.

 

England was late, very late, for political and religious reasons, in developing from those two great European forces. Printing, for example: we know the names in 1500 of a thousand printers across Europe. England had two, both poor. England was late in properly teaching Greek and the new elegant Latin. England was very, very late in teaching Hebrew. As you know, in 1350 all Jews had been expelled from the British Isles and it was not until the mid 1600s that Oliver Cromwell welcomed them back. In the 1530s, however, the European idea of trilingual colleges teaching Latin, Greek and Hebrew began to take hold in England in a small way in Oxford and Cambridge. Twenty years later, in the 1550s, knowledge of Hebrew among English scholars was good.

 

The very first printed translation from Hebrew into English was published in 1530 in Antwerp. It was smuggled across the North Sea into England and Scotland. It was The First Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, and you could buy either the five books singly or all together, unbound, of course, as all books were. These little pocket books were more than adequately printed and there were pictures to help with difficult things like descriptions of ceremonial costume and a few, only a few, in spite of what is usually said, notes in the margins, only six in the whole of Genesis. These very first translations of the five books went on pretty well unchanged to be the basis of all translations thereafter, including the famous so-called ‘King James’ or ‘Authorised Version’ of 1611. And they are still the basis today.

 

That translator, an Englishman working in Antwerp in hourly fear for his life, had got himself taught Hebrew a year or two before in Germany, probably at a rabbinic school in Worms where he had fled to print the first and ground-breaking English New Testament from the original Greek. He was already a scholar. He had had ten years in Oxford and was now adding Hebrew to his other seven languages. All the time in Antwerp he sat alone and hungry in his cold room and translated Hebrew well and, for the first time ever, into English. He was only the third Englishman at the time who knew any Hebrew at all. The other two were Cambridge scholars who knew Hebrew only as an antiquarian hobby. They were not in the slightest interested in translating.

 

The man’s name was William Tyndale and he was passionately interested in translating and in getting the whole of the word of God into English so that could everyone could read it, everyone, from scholar and nobleman and noblewoman to ploughboy and scullery maid. Before long he gave his life for doing that work, being garrotted and burned in 1536. His enemies, who loathed Hebrew and Greek, were both the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope to whom it was heresy to say that the Bible was in any language other than Latin and so, conveniently, incomprehensible to 99 per cent of their flock, so that rulers and bishops could do as they pleased. Particularly, they could extort money by means of devices which the Bible knew nothing of, like the fantasy state of purgatory, invented in the 12^th century and most certainly not in the Bible.

 

William Tyndale not only knew Hebrew, he loved Hebrew. He also loved English and he found that they went together wonderfully. He wrote passionately about that. But, before I come to it, let me give me an example of Tyndale at work. Where, in Genesis I, English people in church, and only in church, may have just caught, mumbled by the distant priest with his back to them, the words fiat lux et lux erat, now Tyndale’s words, presently spoken down the church ringingly to their faces, were ‘Let there be light and there was light’. Incidentally, we all see that phrase everywhere, every day.

 

But hear him handling the Fall at the start of Genesis chapter III. I don’t need to remind you that the tone of the Hebrew is comic tragedy. Tyndale understands that. In wonderfully rhythmic and thus memorable English, and it is very important to realise that rhythm is for memory, hear the beats of the phrases describing God as ‘He walked in the Garden in the cool of the day’, Tyndale allows Eve to prattle to the serpent. This is not a sexist remark. She is, in the original, over-garrulous. And listen to the serpent as he speaks to Eve:

 

‘But the serpent was subtler than all the beasts of the field which the Lord God had made and said unto the woman, ‘Ah Sir!’’

 

I love that: why on earth is the serpent calling Eve ‘Sir’? If I talk about this in America, they all say, ‘No, no. He’s saying, ‘Ah, sure’!’ But there’s no evidence whatsoever that that word, as Tyndale printed it, meant ‘sure’. It’s ‘Ah Sir’. Now you can use the word ‘sir’, masculine, for gender-mixed company in Middle English plays. But this is not the case at all. It is sophisticated seduction. She loves being called ‘Sir’. Somebody once suggested that he’d never seen a naked woman before and didn’t know what to say!

 

‘‘Ah Sir, that God hath said ye shall not eat of all manner of trees in the Garden.’ And the woman said unto the serpent,’

 

I have to take a big breath for this one

 

‘‘Of the fruit of the trees in the Garden we may eat but of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the Garden, said God, see that ye eat not and see that ye touch it not lest ye die’. Then said the serpent unto the woman, ‘Tush! Ye shall not die! But God doth know that whensoever ye should eat of it your eyes should be opened and ye should be as God and know both good and evil’. And the woman saw that it was a good tree to eat of and lusty and unto the eyes and a pleasant tree for to make wise and took of the fruit of it and ate and gave unto her husband also with her and he ate and the eyes of both of them were opened that they understood how that they were naked. Then they sewed fig leaves together and made them aprons.’

 

‘Tush! Ye shall not die!’ It’s wonderful. The authorised version, the King James Version in 1611, spoiled it with the pretentious, ‘Ye shall not surely die!’, looking to the Catholic Church’s Latin, not the original Hebrew. Those later clerics completely missed the ‘pseudo-serpent about town’, which he is. This creature is out to deceive a young woman, almost with gloves and a cane. He is saying, ‘Tush!’, a word which was used in the 16^th century for sophisticated knowing dismissal.

 

Horatio in Act I, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet dismisses the idea of the ghost with, ‘Tush! Tush!’ to have not appear. But it’s perfect.

 

Modern versions say things like, ‘The snake replied, ‘That’s not true’’, which is clear but in the language of a television soap opera. The translator’s problem is one of register. Too lofty and it’s all too distant; too common and all dignity goes. And Tyndale almost always got it right, in the language just above common speech.

 

Tyndale loved the Hebrew. He wrote in his 1528 The Obedience of a Christian Man, he wrote this book to explain that Christians basing their faith on the Bible first, before the Pope, were not as their enemies were saying loudly, particularly Tyndale’s arch enemy Thomas More, ‘plotting and executing national and international insurrection and rebellion’. He argues not only that everyone should have the Bible in the mother tongue, but that, and in this he was indeed far-seeing, the English language was exceptionally important.

 

That’s very striking because in 1528 any form of the language in that damp island off the European shelf, England, was largely unknown in Europe. It is insignificant to European life as Scots Gaelic is to the City of London today. Tyndale’s understanding of the future power of English was wonderful. We have to remember always that Tyndale crafted his words for readers who would read aloud. Silent reading to oneself did not become the usual way until 200 years later. Which is why, above all, he is always so clear.

 

Tyndale wrote of the Hebrew language like this:

 

‘The properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English word for word when I must seek to take a compass…’

 

that means, go round and round and round

 

‘..in the Latin. And yet shalt have much work to translate it well-favouredly so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin as it hath in the Hebrew.’

 

A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.

 

In Genesis alone Tyndale can catch the many different styles of the original: from cosmic scale in Genesis I and II; rawness and comedy in III; to tragedy and horror and wonder and, for example, the stark strangeness of Chapter XXII, Abraham and Isaac.

 

‘And they went both of them together. Then spake Isaac unto Abraham his father and said ‘My father’. And he answered ‘Here am I my son’. And he said ‘See, here is fire and wood but where is the sheep for sacrifice?’ And Abraham said ‘My son God will provide Him a sheep for sacrifice’. So they went both together. And when they came to the place which God had showed him, Abraham made an altar there and dressed the wood and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar above the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to have killed his son.’

 

You know the story. There English, like the Hebrew, makes no comment. The English words can be understood by a child. The matter-of-fact tone expresses horror as well as wonder. Where is this taking place? Where is God? How does he speak to Abraham? Why doesn’t Abraham protest? Even before he takes the knife, the utterly prosaic ‘instructions for assembly’ words are utterly chilling.

 

‘Abraham made an altar there and dressed the wood and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar.’

 

By contrast, Tyndale’s translation of the Joseph story in the last dozen chapters of Genesis is in a style of English that is 200 years ahead: the birth of the English novel with Daniel Defoe. Now this capacity of Tyndale’s to catch exactly many different tones and styles is precisely what is missing in the Church’s thousand-year-old Latin version called the Common Version or the Vulgate. There, this old Bible has the same Latin flavour, the same wash of colour. It’s still Latin, it’s all Latin, sometimes bad Latin, sometimes inaccurate. Whatever else, the Bible is not all the same, as we all know. It’s sad that the King James 1611 Authorised Version reverts so often to the Latin with the same tendency to a uniform, ponderous, authoritarian colour.

 

Tyndale was murdered by the Catholic Church for the heresy of translating the Bible so that everyone could read it. He printed the Pentateuch. Mercifully the following historical books, Joshua to II Chronicles, survived in manuscript and were printed after his death. His translations, amounting now to half the Hebrew Bible, went on to influence all versions afterwards.

 

Before I give examples of English translations from these books, I want to say something about the other half, the difficult half, the poetic and prophetic books. Tyndale was killed before he could get to them. We know from passages of poetry in, for example, Exodus, that he could have translated supremely well. He would have done. Proper knowledge of Hebrew poetry and how it worked wasn’t common among non-Jewish scholars until well over 200 years later.

 

A small group of Englishmen, however, in exile in Geneva in the late 1550s escaping the inevitable burnings by Queen Mary, ‘Bloody Mary’, translated that second half with great skill and often brilliance for what is called the ‘Geneva Bible’ of 1560. Above all, they understood the importance of marginal comment on meanings allowing an inessential ‘in and out’ movement between the literal and the metaphoric. Their translations went on into the King James’ version of 1611, though fatally shorn of the marginal notes for political reasons, and from there round the world forever after.

 

It amazes me that that funny little man King James should have his name attached to the English Bible, particularly in America. He could only call it the ‘King James Bible’ but sometimes it’s the ‘St James Bible’, for heaven’s sake! Though King James had virtually nothing to do with it apart from receiving an appallingly sugary dedication where he is unbelievably referred to as ‘the author of the work’. How blasphemous can you get! While the true heroes of the translation of half the Hebrew, five Englishmen in Geneva, easily the match for William Tyndale in skill, are totally forgotten. Such is the power of politics.

 

Tyndale more than came into his own in the narratives of the four books of the Kings as he knew them. He understood narrative in drive and rhythm, how to pace the story, how to bring it to a climax, how to use colour that properly reflected the original. I was privileged beyond the telling to have as my Hebrew mentor the late and still lamented Michael Weitzman at UCL. So often he sat at my desk and looked at Tyndale with the Hebrew text beside him and said, ‘The man’s a wonder. That’s just perfect for the Hebrew’.

 

Think of the story of David and Absalom. You all know a longish story told over five chapters, the climax being the account of David receiving the news of Absalom’s death. The pulsing narrative drive has come to a stop. Just before, there is a lot of running about by men with news. And the point is the representation of unbearable emotion. The feeling is complex. David knows that Absalom betrayed his father and deserved to die. That Absalom was contending for his throne. That his own forces have won a notable victory over a skilful soldier and leader. That a cunning and destructive schemer, Ahithophel, has been defeated, and so on. But the point of the paragraph is pure feeling, David’s terrible grief. Moreover, it is royal grief. We have to be aware of the true height of the feeling. It won’t do to render it: ‘I dunno, I guess I’m sorta kinda feeling sad’.

 

We have to have the conveying not only of that feeling a depth in David, but also outside him. It’s very important, this. In the reality of Absalom outside him as a beloved son, and here is Tyndale: the last paragraph of Chapter XVIII of II Samuel.

 

‘And behold Cushi came and said: Tidings, my lord the king, the Lord hath quit thee this day out of the hands of all that rose against thee. And the king said to Cushi, ‘Is the lad Absalom safe?’ And Cushi answered, ‘The enemies of my lord the king and all that rise against thee to have thee be as they lad is’. And the king was moved and went up to a chamber over the gate and wept. And as he went thus he said, ‘My son, Absalom, my son, my son. My son Absalom. Would to God I had died for thee, Absalom, my son, my son.’

 

Now Tyndale’s so conscious of rhythm, he adds a ‘my son’. And it is not for nothing that there have been some wonderful English musical settings of these sentences as taken straight into the King James’ Bible. Tyndale’s ‘Would to God I had died for thee’ is rhythmically perfect for the shape of the sense, from the wish, then to God, then to him, then to death, ending with Absalom. I don’t understand why modern versions feel they have to change this, and especially to debase it, as the most widespread modern version says, ‘If only I had died in your place’ which, in its self-centredness, flabbiness of phrase and replacement of the piercingly human ‘for thee’ with the abstract ‘in your place’ is horribly wrong in every way.

 

Tyndale was born and brought up in Gloucestershire, a county, it seems, unusually rich in proverbs. He used that form to catch the register of common speech but also as a model for avoiding what linguistic scholars call redundancy, a fuzziness, caused by using more words than the sense warrants, as proverbs never do. You can’t get shorter than ‘Many hands make light work’.

 

Tyndale also understood the thrust of proverbs. Often dating from Anglo-Saxon times, proverbs can express a common wisdom with devastating force, like steel to the heart. Tyndale has a very funny passage in his Obedience about the wisdom of popular sayings. He uses this power quite often. It is one of the reasons why so very many of his phrases have lived on and become part of common speech ever after, hundreds of them, from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’, ‘Play the man’, ‘A man after his own heart’, ‘Hewers of wood and drawers of water’, ‘Tell it not in Gath’, ‘Passing the love of women’ and so on. Not to mention English coinages like ‘mercy seat’, ‘Passover’ and ‘scapegoat’, all Tyndale’s.

 

Now, on the Today programme, junior government ministers, when political things are foggy, say ‘Let me make this absolutely clear’. But in this case, I am not foggy at all, but let me make it absolutely clear: My interest in Tyndale is not antiquarian. Why I talk like this this evening about Bible narratives in English is almost all about Tyndale. It is because he is very much still with us. With some exceptions arising from shifts in the shape of English written and spoken since the 1530s, and from the growth in the technical tools available for studying Hebrew since then, what Tyndale, our first translator of Hebrew into English, wrote is still the foundation or is only left at the cost of dignity and power.

 

Tyndale’s work went almost unchanged through the ten or so versions of the English Bible between him in the 1530s and the 1611 King James version. And from that hugely disseminated version, especially in America, printed in billions, to today’s versions which aim to be faithful to the original, which not all are, as Hamlet’s ghost said, ‘I could a tale unfold’, Tyndale is still there.

 

Here’s an example of Tyndale’s Hebrew understanding and proverbial directness. Do you remember the story in II Kings IV about Elisha and the Sunnamite woman? How he promised her, against all likelihood, that she and her husband would have a child and the lad suddenly died. The distraught mother sought the prophet out, travelling a great distance to confront him. Now every English version that I have seen suggests that she says when she finds Elisha something like ‘Did I not say: Do not deceive me?’ Or, in that popular modern version, ‘Didn’t I tell you not to raise my hopes?’

 

But, sitting beside me, Michael Weitzman saw in the Hebrew something more than deception. A touch of her awareness of her own betrayed wishfulness. So Tyndale has, to Michael Weitzman’s delight,

 

‘Then she went to the man of God up to the hill and caught him by the feet. And Gehazi went to her to thrust her away but the man of God said, ‘Let her alone for her soul is vexed and the Lord hath hid it from me and hath not told it me.’ Then she said, ‘Did I desire a son of my lord? Did I not say that thou shouldst not bring me in a fool’s paradise?’

 

Tyndale has many such moments, catching the words of everyday life in high moments. David’s son, the wicked Amnon, lusted eagerly after his sister Tamar and wished to rape her. He feigns sick. He asked his father to order her to come to his room saying, ‘Let my sister come and make a couple of fritters’. Perfect for the falsely casual pretext which will tip over into such appalling consequences. The King James version has ‘a couple of cakes’. The bishops thought fritters too low a word, though they keep ‘a couple of’. Modern translations have ‘a few cakes’, which has thrown away the casualness of ‘a couple of fritters’.

 

Wonderfully, Tyndale makes a marvellous leap in his description of Solomon’s staggering wealth in I Kings X. One example is what came to Solomon every third year in ships. Now even today it is not quite certain what the amazingly exotic gifts arriving in these ships were. We turn for guidance to the early Greek version, the Septuagint, always a helpful thing to do, and find that the Septuagint translator simply hadn’t a clue. For him it was several funny things. He fudges it with mumbling about warriors and chariots and children and racehorses, what he imagined Solomon would want.

 

It is thought today that after gold and silver the next is possibly bears or perhaps baboons. The last then is something colourful. Tyndale did what he could, taking guidance as I discovered from a later Septuagint version, and producing the utterly memorable statement of what the ships brought. Instead of the Septuagint translator’s normal imports are things that are limits of the unexpected:

 

‘The ships came every third year laden with gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks.’

 

Just listen to that. The vowels of gold, silver and ivory chime together. And ivory was a new word in 1530. Then the vowels and consonants of apes and peacocks chime and the forming trochee of ‘peacocks’ after ‘apes and’ makes a perfect cadence. ‘Monkeys and peacocks’ would be more of a mouthful. It sounds wonderful. And again, not for nothing did Rudyard Kipling make a fine poem out of it. And the wonderful sound matches the rising exoticism. Okay, if it shouldn’t be apes but baboons or little brown bears, so be it. Tyndale stirs the blood with sense and rhythm, which is what is wanted. The King James revisers ruined it all by adding ‘ands’:

 

‘Gold and silver and ivory and apes.’

 

Wrong. Wrong.

 

Proverbs and common speech gave him a register which has remained in modern speech. Someone dies of an ‘incurable disease’ in Tyndale. People having sex ‘sleep with each other’. Modern attempts not to say that in the Bible can be very, very funny. I find as always that looking at the English power of Hebrew narrative reveals it at its best in Tyndale. He knows that speed, pacing the narrative, does not mean being racy. He knows how to get people talking.

 

[…]

 

I need to take a little longer to talk about the business of the essential height of narrative register in English. How we got from the 16^th century translators Shakespeare and Milton. Not supermarket checkout statements. High narrative in English doesn’t mean being like Latin. Milton is far more Saxon that he is given credit for. And Shakespeare knows the power of clear Saxon. High epic narrative needs attention to clarity and rhythm. A vocabulary. Many, many modern versions appear on the pretext that the older ones are incomprehensible to youth, and that is nonsense! The Hebrew narratives in English, from Tyndale especially, are on the page more comprehensible than J. R. Tolkien. For young people who are, in the American Bill Bryson’s terrible phrase about American high school graduates he’d met ‘as ignorant as pigs’ dribble’, anything, and this is not Bill Bryson, that happens to them above the navel is incomprehensible. Why should the original force be weakened for such? How can Elisha, speaking in God’s name to the murderous King Ahab, not be understood?

 

‘Where dogs lapped the blood of Naboth shall dogs lap even thy blood also.’

 

Oooh! True, it is not what we would say, not how we would say it. But, then, we are never going to say it. And of his wife he says:

 

‘Dogs shall eat Jezebel under the walls of Jezre’el’

 

which is what happened.

 

I want to settle down and read to you a great deal of Tyndale translating narrative, the story of Jael and Sisera in Judges IV and V.

 

‘She caught a nail in her left hand and a working hammer in her right. Between her feet he bowed himself, fell down and lay still.’

 

The stories of Samson in Judge XIII to XVI. The Na’aman story. Most of the David stories and Elijah and Elisha.

 

But we haven’t time. Perhaps another time.

 

What I want to do to finish, and I really will finish in two minutes, is something short but I hope telling. It shows Tyndale miraculous. Because what I haven’t had time to say is that no one, absolutely no one, was writing English like this at his time. He can catch the most difficult register of all, that of epic height. A single wobble of tone, and we want to giggle.

 

Think of all those great Hollywood epic motion pictures. A favourite of mine: the 1963 Agony and the Ecstasy with the Pope (Rex Harrison) rebuking Michelangelo (who is Charlton Heston) with the words ‘How dare you quibble with your pontiff?’

But Tyndale doesn’t wobble. I’ve only time for a few sentences from this story. It’s from I Kings XVIII where the prophet Elijah is told by the Lord to confront the evil and dangerous King Ahab. Tyndale uses the Greek force of Elisha as ‘Elijah’.

 

‘And when Ahab saw Elijah he said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he said, It is not I that trouble Israel but thou and thy father’s house in that he hath forsaken the commandments of the Lord and has followed Baal.’

 

It’s impossible to mumble that. A moment later Elijah makes Ahab agree to hold a sort of ‘God contest’ before all the people. You know all this!

 

‘And Elijah came unto all the people and said, ‘Why halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be very God, follow Him or if Baal be he follow him.’ And the people answered him not one word.’

 

Look first at that word ‘halt’. It means walk with a limp, drag a foot, hesitate. It survives in the modern ‘he spoke haltingly’. The Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible of 1966 makes Elijah say there:

 

‘Why do you hobble first on one foot and then on the other?’

 

which is philologically correct but uses ten words for Tyndale’s one and is quite impossible to declare ringingly with a trumpet sound. But there’s more. What was just coming into the meaning of ‘half’ in 1530 was the modern notion of ‘stop’. Tyndale, using a meaning from the future, as it were, has Elijah asking that one word, why they are stuck, hobbling on the fence as it were. It’s a key moment in the religious history of the people and ‘halt’ delivers it wonderfully. But there’s more!

Tyndale’s conclusion to Elijah’s question is pure magic. The people are more than lumpen and religiously stupid because they are distracted by all that Baal worship. They are ashamed. Elijah, as the Bible makes so clear, is a toweringly powerful presence as a man of God. He asks them the one question that they don’t want to hear, as God tends to do. Here again their reaction in Tyndale’s sentence:

 

‘And the people answered him not one word.’

 

Those three final ‘thomps’ are wonderful. Tyndale always knows about cadence, how to end phrases. Again, ‘I could a tale unfold’. The King James revisers, as so often, killed it with:

 

‘And the people answered him not a word.’

 

No, no. Those are three light running syllables, ‘not a word’. As vacant as the wind. Our most popular modern version has:

 

‘But the people didn’t say a word’

 

which, in its soap opera banality, is so much worse. ‘I asked him where he’d been all morning and he didn’t say a word.’ Tyndale understood epic weight as well as height. The three monosyllables have to be spoken slowly. They answered Elijah ‘ not one word’. It’s an orchestral effect.

 

Thank you for listening to me. I shall say not one word more. [Applause]