第28章

Rising now from this basal element in the literature of the version, we come to the place where its style and its ideas blend in what we may call its earnestness.That is itself a literary characteristic.There is not a line of trifling in the book.No man would ever learn trifling from it.It takes itself with tremendous seriousness.Here are earnest men at work; to them life is joyous, but it is no joke.That is why the element of humor in it is such a small one.It is there, to be sure.Many of its similes are intended to be humorous.A few of its incidents are humorous; but it has little of that element in it, as indeed little of our literature has that element markedly in it.We have a few exceptions.But what George Eliot says in Adam Bede is true, that wit is of a temporary nature, and does not deal with the deep and more lasting elements in life.The Bible is not a sad book.There are children at play in it; there are feasts and buoyant gatherings fully recounted.But it never trifles nor jests.

So it has given us a language of great dignity.Let Addison speak again: "How cold and dead does a prayer appear that is composed in the most elegant and polite forms of speech, which are natural to our tongue, when it is not heightened by that solemnity of phrase which may be drawn from the sacred writings.It has been said by some of the ancients that if the gods were to talk with men, they would certainly speak in Plato's style; but I think we may say, with justice, that when mortals converse with their Creator they cannot do it in so proper a style as in that of the Holy Scriptures."As that earnestness of the literature of the original precluded any great amount of humor in the wide range of its literary forms, so in the King James version it precluded any trifling expressions, any plays on words, even the duplication of such plays as can be found in the Hebrew or the Greek.You seldom find any turn of a word in the King James version, though you do occasionally find it in the Hebrew.One such punning expression occurs in the story of Samson (Judges xv:16), where our version reads: "With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass have I slain a thousand men." In the Hebrew the words translated "ass" and "heaps" are variants of the same word.It comes near the Hebrew to say: "With the jawbone of an ass, masses upon masses,"and so on.These translators would not risk reproducing such puns for fear of lowering the dignity of their results.There is a deadly seriousness about their work and so they never lose strength as they go on.

That earnestness grows out of a second fact which may be emphasized--namely, the greatness of the themes of Bible literature.Here is history, but it is not cast into fiction form.History always becomes more interesting for a first reading when it is in the form of fiction; but it always loses greatness in that form.Test it by turning from a history of the American revolutionary or civil war to an historical novel that deals with the same period; or from a history of Scotland to the Waverly novels.In some degree the earnestness of the time is lost; the same facts are there; but they do not loom so large, nor do they seem so great.So there is power in the fact that the historical elements of the version are in stately form and are never sacrificed to the fictional form.

These great themes save the work from being local.It issues from life, but from life considered in the large.The themes of great literature are great enough to make their immediate surroundings forgotten."The English Bible deals with the great facts and the great problems.It is from the point of view of those great facts that it handles even commonplace things, and you forget the commonplaceness of the things in the greatness of the dealing.Take its attitude toward God.One needs the sense of that great theme to read it fairly.It quietly overlooks secondary causes, goes back of them to God.Partly that was because the original writers were ignorant of some of those secondary causes; partly that they knew them, but wanted to go farther back.Take the most outstanding instance, that of the Book of Jonah.All its facts, without exception, can be told without mention of God, if one cared to do it.But there could not be anything like so great a story if it is told that way.One of his biographers says of Lincoln that there is nothing in his whole career which calls for explanation in other than a purely natural and human way.That is true, if one does not care to go any farther back than that.But the greatest story cannot be made out of Lincoln's life on those terms.There is not material enough; the life must be delocalized.It can be told without that larger view, so that it will be of interest to America and American children, butnot so that it will be of value to generations of men in all countries and under all circumstances if it is told on those terms.Part of the greatness of Scripture, from a literary point of view, is that it has such a tremendous range of theme, and is saved from a mere narration of local events by seeing those events in the light of larger considerations.

Let that stand for one of the great facts.Now take one of the great problems.The thing that makes Job so great a classic is the fact that, while it is dealing with a character, he is standing for the problem of undeserved suffering.A man who has that before him, if he has at all the gift of imagination, is sure to write in a far larger way than when he is dealing with a man with boils as though he were finally important.One could deal with Job as a character, and do a small piece of work.But when you deal with Job as a type, a much larger opportunity offers.