Four centuries on, the King James Bible (KJB) still stands as one of the towering achievements of style in the English language. Subsequent translations of the Bible have only highlighted the grandeur of the 1611 version. The Revised Standard Version in its various recensions, though relatively more correct and less archaic, is a flattening and dilution of the seventeenth-century translation. The sundry English versions done by the scholarly-ecclesiastical committees of the different denominations in the second half of the twentieth century are for the most part stylistically inept and often embarrassing in their mixture of disparate linguistic registers and in their misguided efforts to make the syntax and diction of the ancient texts sound up-to-date. The power of the KJB is vividly registered in the multiple ways it has affected the shape of literary English from the seventeenth century to the present – in England, early on, in George Herbert, Bunyon, Blake, and others; in America, where the legacy of the KJB eventually became more pervasive, in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Whitman, in the prose style of Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, and all the way to Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy in the present literary moment.

Literary approaches to the bible

Perceptions of the literary dimensions of the Hebrew Bible have a long prehistory, and they surely did not begin in America, England, Israel, and the Netherlands in the 1970s, as some have imagined. It is obviously true that the notion of Scripture as literal revelation, shared by Christians and Jews, to a large extent deflected interpreters over the centuries from explicitly considering the literary shaping of the biblical texts, which were characteristically viewed as sources of theological truth and moral or spiritual instruction. Nevertheless, these texts had some very good readers from Late Antiquity onward who were by no means blind to the literary richness of the narratives and the poetry. Thus, the framers of rabbinic Midrash more than a millennium and a half ago, of course did not speak of recurrent motifs or mirroring episodes as a modern literary critic might do. Yet, Genesis Rabbah picked up the motif of deception through a garment, in each case linked with a kid, and the recurring keyword recognize (haker), which tied in Genesis 38 with Genesis 37. They equally identified the story of Jacob's switched brides as a measure-for-measure response to the story of his stealing the paternal blessing.

A finely imaginative sensitivity to the literary articulations of the biblical texts is registered in thousands of instances of allusions to the Bible in medieval Hebrew poetry, especially in its greatest age in eleventh- and twelfth-century Spain. Poets such as Samuel Hanagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah Halevi, although they were believing Jews who presumably saw the Bible as divine revelation, clearly were also reading both the narratives and the poems as literature because their responsiveness to the imagery of the biblical poems and to the complexities of the biblical stories is strongly registered in their own poetry. A paradigmatic case in point is the beginning of a poem by Hanagid on the death of his beloved brother Yitzhak: “May God grant grace to you, my brother.” This is a precise quotation of Joseph's words to Benjamin when his younger brother is first brought to him in Egypt (Genesis 43:29), except that Joseph says “my son,” still concealing his true identity. Soon he will reveal himself and embrace his brother, weeping. Hanagid uses the term of true relationship that Joseph withholds, but he is keenly aware that in his case there can be no reunion with the brother now parted from him forever. His identification with the biblical figure is heightened by his awareness that he, too, is a Hebrew who has ascended to great power, as vizier of Granada. In all of this, he is brilliantly reading the narrative in Genesis as a moving story. At least in Hebrew tradition, the Bible maintained what I have called elsewhere a “double canonicity,” literary as well as doctrinal.

Any critical interpretation of the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible is dependent, or certainly should be dependent, on an understanding of the distinctive character of biblical poetry. On this question there has been less of a consensus than one might have expected at this late date in modern biblical studies. Broadly speaking, I would say that the investigation of biblical poetry since the beginning of the 1980s has made some real if uneven advances, against an unfortunately persistent background of confusions, misperceptions and aridly academic overcomplications.

The notion that biblical poetry is organized on a parallelism of meaning and structures between the two - sometimes three - parts of a line was first systematically articulated by Robert Lowth in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, originally published in Latin in 1753. Though the first two of his three categories of parallelism - synonymous and antithetical - are demonstrably operative in thousands of lines of biblical verse, his third category, 'synthetic parallelism', would come to seem in the eyes of many critics no parallelism at all, leading to some uneasiness with the theory as a whole. In the course of time, scholars would propose the most intricate varieties of sub-categories of parallelism in order to save the system, and, in the opposite direction, especially beginning in the 1970s, counter-systems would be put forth that relegated parallelism to a purely secondary role. Thus, syllable-count, sentence-types, syntax, musical quantity, thought-unit were each in turn promoted by various scholars as being the real organizing principle of biblical poetry. None of these theories has won general acceptance, and each, I believe, can be shown to be compromised by either internal contradictions or some basic misunderstanding of how poetry works.