Biblical Tongues 0
The two bodies of work said to have had the greatest effect on modern English are text messages and AOL Instant Messenger Shakespeare’s plays and the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible.
They did not accomplish this in a vacuum; they came at a time when spreading literacy and the use of the printing press facilitated their ability to influence more than a few Oxbridge Dons and isolated lordly literary dilettantes. The article fascinates. A nugget:
“The translators seem to have taken the view that the best translation was a literal one, so instead of adapting Hebrew and Greek to English forms of speaking they simply translated it literally. The result wouldn’t have made all that much sense to readers, but they got used to it, and so these fundamentally foreign ways of expressing yourself became accepted as normal English through the influence of this major public text.”
Examples of Hebrew idiom that have become English via the Bible include: “to set one’s teeth on edge”, “by the skin of one’s teeth”, “the land of the living” and “from strength to strength”.
