Old Testament,The: Introduction By Georg

The King James Version of the Bible has been the favorite of English readers for centuries. This Everyman's Library edition also contains George Steiner's introduction which reminds us of the text's literary grandeur and cultural centrality.

"What you have in hand is not a book. It is the book. That, of course, is what 'Bible' means. It is the book which, not only in Western humanity, defines the concept of a text. All our other books, however different in matter or method, relate, be it indirectly, to this book of books...

"All other books, be they histories, narrations of the imaginary, codes of law, moral treatises, lyric poems, dramatic dialogues, theological-philosophic meditations, are like sparks, often, to be sure, distant, tossed by an incessant breath from a central fire. In the Western condition, but also in other parts of the planet to which the 'Good Book' has been taken, the Bible largely informs our historical and social identity... No other book is like it; all other books are inhabited by the murmur of that distant source."

Steiner underlines, as well, our great good fortune in being able to read the Bible—which has been translated in whole or in part into more than two thousand languages—in the resplendent language of seventeenth-century England. "This is the instrument of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Bacon, of Donne and the young Milton. It encompasses the organ blasts of the Queen's rhetoric, Sidney's intimacies of desire, the 'lapidary lightness' of Ben Jonson, and the compaction of the early Metaphysical poets. It can command, seduce, enchant, and think aloud as never before or since...There could not have been a moment, a climate of feeling and general discourse, more apt to engender the two foremost constructs in the language: Shakespeare and the King James Version."

Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones were, respectively, Professor of English at Aberystwyth and Cardiff and Professor of Welsh at Aberystwyth. They are the authors of numerous works of scholarship in Welsh and in English.