It’s budget day and the most exciting media release I’m going to get is about an exhibition of the history of the King James Bible that’s opening at Parliament House.
If you’re unfamiliar with this crucial piece of English language history then a good starting place is renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair article:
A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”
They’ve also sent me a handy list of phrases you might be familiar with thanks to the KJV:
- — A broken heart
— A labour of love
— A thorn in the flesh
— A two-edged sword
— Am I my brother’s keeper?
— An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
— At his wits end
— By the skin of your teeth
— Eat drink and be merry
— Eye to eye
— Feet of clay
— Fight the good fight
— Flesh and blood
— From strength to strength
— Good Samaritan
— In the twinkling of an eye
— Lamb to the slaughter
— Let not the sun go down on your wrath
— Letter of the law
— Love thy neighbour as thyself
— Nothing new under the sun
— O ye, of little faith
— Pride goes before a fall
— Strait and narrow
— The apple of his eye
— The blind leading the blind
— The writing is on the wall
— To every thing there is a season
From the media release:
Over the next few months, the exhibition entitled, The Book That Changed the World, will travel to every state and territory, featuring an original edition of the KJV as well as other documents relating to this key English text, and subsequent translations into other tongues.
Dr. Clarke said, “It’s a privilege to mark this historic anniversary, allowing people to see not only an original King James Bible from 1611, but a carefully selected display of significant Bibles in the life of Australia since the early days of the British colony.
“Among the exhibits will be the beautifully-bound and embellished Bible presented in 1901 to Lord Hopetoun, Australia’s first Governor-General, at the time of Federation. Every Governor-General of Australia has since sworn on that Bible when they came to office.”
Some more images from the exhibition:
Loading ...
