How the Bible Brought a "Fly in the Ointment" to English

Have you ever fallen flat on your face? Can you read the writing on the wall? Do you ever think about escaping, perhaps by the skin of your teeth before it's too late? When things are going well, do you look for the fly in the ointment? If you answered "Yes" to these questions, you are in good company.

Shakespeare, however, never fell flat on his face. He couldn't read the writing on the wall, never once escaped by the skin of his teeth, and his ointment was always free of flies. The Bard, that great master of vocabulary and wordplay, could do none of these things, for these metaphors did not enter the English language until close to the time of his death in 1616. Like so much of the English language, these quaint and timeless expressions were borrowed from another tongue-in this case, Hebrew.

The introduction of classical Hebrew phrases into the language-one of the most interesting developments in the shaping of Modern English-dates from the early seventeenth century with the arrival of the King James Bible. King James I, anxious to ensure religious stability in England, agreed to the production of this new English translation of the Bible. It was expected to be the best ever, drawing on a translation team of about fifty leading scholars. Six teams were assembled at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster, and each was entrusted with the task of translating part of the work.

The authors of The Story of English, a companion to the PBS television series on the history of the English language, point out that, "The King James Bible was published in the year Shakespeare began work on his last play, The Tempest. Both the play and the Bible are masterpieces of English, but there is one crucial difference between them. Whereas Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon, the King James Bible employs a bare 8,000 words-God's teaching in homely English for everyman."

True, the Bible used plain and common words, but as American Rabbi William Rosenau observes, it took those words and "molded new forms and phrases, which, while foreign to the English, became with it flesh and bone." Here's what happened: The translators believed the best way of ensuring accuracy was to translate each and every word of the original, one by one. This literal translation of the Old Testament's Hebrew introduced a large number of new, and somewhat unusual, phrases into the English language.

Continued on page 2: »