E-text prepared by Stephen Hope, Fox in the Stars,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
Transcriber's Note: A minor printing error was corrected (Gen. xliv 29).
That which we call 'The Bible' has the outward appearanceof a book: in reality it is—what the word 'bible'implies in the original Greek—a whole library. Morethan fifty books, the production of a large number of differentauthors, representing periods of time extending overmany centuries, are all comprehended between the coversof a single volume. There is no greater monument ofthe power of printing to diffuse thought than this fact,that the whole classic literature of one of the world'sgreatest peoples can be carried about in the hand or thepocket.
But there is another side to the matter. A high pricehas been paid for this feat of manufacturing a portableliterature: no less a price than the effacement from thebooks of the Bible of their whole literary structure.Where the literature is dramatic, there are (except in onebook) no names of speakers nor divisions of speeches;there are no titles to essays or poems, nor anything tomark where one poem or discourse ends and anotherbegins; not only is there nothing to reflect finer rhythmicdistinctions in poetry, but (in King James's version) thereis not even a distinction made between poetry and prose.[vi]It is as if the whole were printed 'solid,' like a newspaperwithout the newspaper headings. The most familiarEnglish literature treated in this fashion would lose a greatpart of its literary interest; the writings of the Hebrewssuffer still more through our unfamiliarity with many of theliterary forms in which they are cast. Even this statementdoes not fully represent the injury done to the literatureof the Bible by the traditional shape in which it is presentedto us. Between the Biblical writers and our owntimes have intervened ages in which all interest in literarybeauty was lost, and philosophic activity took the form ofprotracted discussions of brief sayings or 'texts.' Accordinglythis solidified matter of Hebrew literature has beendivided up into single sentences or 'verses,' numberedmechanically one, two, three, etc., and thus the originalliterary form has still further been obscured. It is notsurprising that to most rea