If God is Milton’s father, and his scriptural word is the strongest of all precursor texts, then the King James Bible (KJB) is the most intimidating version of that text. In Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the Mosaic law enshrined in the Bible occupies the place usually reserved for Christ as the incarnation of deity: “the law is [God’s] reveled will, … herein he appears to us as it were in human shape, enters into cov’nant with us.” Milton is both the most learned and most biblico-centric of the great British poets. He read the Old Testament in Hebrew (and the relevant parts of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic, which he called Chaldee), the New Testament in Greek, as well as the Latin translations of both the Vulgate and the Protestant Junius–Tremellius Bible, the latter used with some frequency in his prose. Although Milton’s third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, owned a Geneva Bible of 1588, there is no evidence that her husband used it. The only edition of the Bible that bears incontrovertible signs of Miltonic ownership is a 1612 printing by Robert Barker of the King James Bible, with seven entries and various marginal notations in Milton’s own hand.

James H. Sims has painstakingly counted 1,364 individual biblical citations in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained alone, recorded by Milton’s editors from Patrick Hume in 1695 to Merritt Hughes in 1957, and he has added 816 citations of his own. And Michael Bauman has provided an index to more than 9,000 biblical quotations, citations, and allusions (to the last of which he has taken a conservative approach) in Milton’s highly original work of systematic theology, De doctrina Christiana. What follows in this essay are three mere snapshots of Milton and the Bible, taken in youth, middle age, and (if, with Shakespeare as the standard, early modern poets over fifty can still be called old) old age. The focus is on the poet’s anxiety or conspicuous lack of it in relation to the KJB.