The State Bibles: The Anglo-Dutch Politics of the King James Version and the Statenvertaling, by Esther van Raamsdonk, is the first extended comparative study of two key bible translations of the early modern period – the King James Version (1611) and the Dutch Statenvertaling (1637).
The production of a new bible translation is fraught with tension. Tasked with delivering divine Scripture to a community of speakers, the translators must navigate not just scholarship of ancient languages, but also the existing traditions of translation, the social mores of the intended readers, and even the political constructions of the day. This was nowhere more evident than in the early modern period, as the rise in vernacular texts and printing, the spread of Protestant communities and sects, and the consolidation of modern nations states endowed Bible translations with importance beyond their religious meaning.
The State Bibles is the first major study of these tensions that is also structurally comparative. From ‘within’ a national tradition it can be very hard to pick out where a particular translation has made choices that reflect its social and political context; by placing translations within a wider (mostly European) picture, differences begin to emerge that are not merely Protestant vs Catholic or matters of scholarship. We can also trace patterns of influence or divergence in word choice, annotations, and even imagery.
The argument that drives this book is that a transnational view is needed to understand how these complex texts took their final form, in everything from the education of the translators to the art of the frontispieces; from the other European translations in circulation to the physical printing of the books. The State Bibles takes as its central examples England and the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, two states that were extraordinarily closely intertwined, through politics, trade, migrant communities and religious debates. Relations were not always cordial – trade rivalry and conflict were common – but they were so mutually influential that it is impossible to fully grasp either state’s history without reference to the other.
England and the Dutch Republic also happen to have produced two of the most renowned Bible translations of that or any other time – the King James Version (KJV, 1611) and the Statenvertaling (The States’ Translation, SV, 1637). They are exemplary instances of state bibles – commissioned and authorised by a national rather than a solely religious institution; their level of scholarship was widely recognised at the time, even beyond linguistic borders; they represent high points in what was a vibrant history of English and Dutch vernacular translation; and they were mutually influential in ways not widely recognised in scholarship. If it is not too dramatic an image, the KJV and the SV are like a binary star system – bright and mighty beacons trapped in an unending dance, around which many other texts and ideas orbit.
And what other bodies do we find in this binary system? Other translations whose influence on the KJV and SV are marked, such as the line of previous English authorised bibles, whose words and phrases were preserved, even while each translation presented itself as returning to the original source texts. Literary adaptations of biblical narratives that by turns reflect the authorised translation of the time or preserve a version of the text that had been excised from the approved version, such as in adaptations of the Book of Esther; political ideas and commentary that drew on the differences between translations (and still further afield Rabbinic traditions) to argue for their view of the world from biblical authority.
For this last cluster, The State Bibles spends considerable time unpicking the complicated notion of kingship, which is at best ambiguous in the Bible, and was hotly contested in the early modern period. Chapters on Kings David and Ahab show how the same single passage could be put to use to condemn monarchy as inherently corrupt, to provide moral guidance to kings, or to endorse the divine right of kings.
Naturally, this question was of considerable interest to both King James VI/I of England, who believed in his divinely appointed right to rule, and the recently created Republican government in the Netherlands. But how does this emerge in a translation that is ultimately indexed to the perfect and unchanging Word of God? The answer to this question is: in great variety of ways! By contrasting the translations, and also placing them within the wider European context, subtle but consistent differences arise.
In the annotations, the KJV is mainly a scholarly reference work, providing cross-references and clarifications of interpolations or alternative renderings. This reflects that the bible was designed for ‘reading in churches’, by trained clergymen who could be relied upon to gloss the content accordingly for their congregations. James VI/I was head of the State Church, but the Church of England itself has never been doctrinally uniform, encompassing diverse strands of Protestantism. The KJV serves this institutional flexibility. The SV, on the other hand, was commissioned largely because of the doctrinal battles that led to the Synod of Dort (1618-9) regarding predestination. The translation is heavily annotated with instructions on how the private reader should understand certain ‘duystere plaetsen’ [dark places]. On the one hand it is a much more democratic text, suitable for home study, on the other hand its accompanying notes are doctrinally much more controlling. While not explicitly anti-monarchical, the annotations do touch on issues of rulership and put a negative spin on kingship in general.
Studying the KJV and SV in this transnational mode allows The State Bibles to look beyond the confines of national traditions to ask which long-term factors influenced their creation, from intellectual and political tussles, to technological and artistic advances. Along the way we encounter Dutch Mennonite Royalist playwrights, English Catholic poets, Danish civil wars, English sects in Geneva, German master craftsmen and critical tracts on the quality of both translations. From this crowd of fellow travellers emerges a new way of seeing texts that now occupy central places in our religious, literary, and political lives.
The State Bibles: The Anglo-Dutch Politics of the King James Version and the Statenvertaling, by Esther van Raamsdonk, is now available 20% off on our website.
Dr Esther van Raamsdonk is a lecturer in the department for English Language Culture at Utrecht University, having worked previously at the University of Oxford, Warwick University, and Queen Mary University, London. Much of her work centres on Anglo- Dutch connections in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her first monograph traced such connections in the works of John Milton and Andrew Marvell (Milton, Marvell, and the Dutch Republic). She has published on the politics of Bible translation, representations of Scripture in Vondel and Milton, travelogues, digital humanities and correspondence networks, and early modern cheese.
Follow us for more updates
Sign up to our mailing list
Follow us on social media
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Liverpool University Press Blog 