Melvyn Bragg has said that it is a disgrace that the Bible is no longer read or taught in schools – but what would it mean if it were? Bragg’s interest in the Bible is not that he thinks it is true, but that the language of the Authorised Version of 1611 is beautiful – which, in parts, it undoubtedly is.
Bragg compares the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer to Shakespeare and this captures something very important. They are all texts written to be read out loud, indeed to be acted. Both the priests and the congregation have their parts to play and it is only by reciting the words, or by listening to them as a collective action, that they can do their work.
This is what the law still more or less says that schools ought to do. There is a requirement for a daily act of worship of a “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character” in all state schools. In Bragg’s childhood this would have meant readings, or performances, from the Bible every morning. But that law is a dead letter nowadays.
It’s not just schools: few churches today teach the Bible translation that Bragg loves. The old version contains many words whose meaning has changed drastically over four centuries. In 1613, “suffer” meant “allow”, “let” meant “prevent” and “prevent” meant “come before”. “Ass” of course meant “donkey” and “to know a woman” meant “to have sex with her”.
Contemporary translations avoid all those pitfalls but they also cast a veil of ordinariness over the stark horror of many of the stories.
The Bible in the raw is not in the least bit like a Disney version. The story of Samson and Delilah is even more disturbing in the original: Samson first demands a Philistine wife and then, when she tricks him into losing a bet, kills 30 men for their clothes to pay it off. This casts a pall on the festivities and Samson storms off home.
Her father gives the discarded wife to another man and offers Samson her younger sister instead. He is insulted, so he burns the Philistines’ fields in revenge: they are upset and burn to death his father-in-law and wife; he kills another 1,000 of them. Finally, he takes up with a “harlot” in Gaza before making the unfortunate final choice of Delilah who persuades him to tell her that his strength lies in his hair. He falls asleep on her lap; a Philistine barber shaves him while he sleeps and when he wakes his superhuman strength is gone. The Philistines gouge out his eyes, and chain him as a prisoner. They don’t notice that his hair is growing again. At last, they bring him out and he is able to push down the pillars of their temple, crushing thousands and dying happily.
But the stories are told much better in the older translations.
Compare two versions of an Old Testament tale that could have come straight from The Wire: David, God’s chosen leader, has armed his gang and is leading them on a raid against a neighbouring landowner who has insulted him. He makes a speech to encourage his troops to the slaughter: they are to kill all of his enemy’s male slaves. It goes without saying that they are to rape the women. Just then, his enemy’s terrified wife rides up with a food offering to placate the angry gang.
In the New International Version, which you are likely to find in church, David says of his enemy: “He has paid me back evil for good. May God deal with David, be it ever so severely, if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!’
“When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off her donkey and bowed down before David with her face to the ground.”
The jolly public school phrases such as “be it ever so severely” make the atrocity merely quaint.
In the Authorised Version, Bragg’s preferred translation, this passage runs: “Now David had said … he hath requited me evil for good. So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall. And when Abigail saw David, she hasted, and lighted off the ass, and fell before David on her face, and bowed herself to the ground ...”
That story has a sort of happy ending. David, placated, calls off his massacre. Abigail’s husband dies and she is rewarded by becoming one of David’s wives.
The old language has a stark strangeness that conveys something of the moral horror of the story. But how would you possibly teach it in school?