Introduction

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After several early revisions, there appeared in 1611 a magnificent edition of the English Bible commonly known as the King James Version or Authorised Version. Over approximately the next three centuries, it occupied pride of place as 'the Bible' for most English-speaking readers. In many respects it was a very fine translation, the product of an able committee of the highest caliber of scholars available at its time of publication.

The KJV continues to enjoy wide circulation, and yet it is generally felt that it is for several reasons not quite an adequate translation for modern needs. For one thing, its language is so archaic that it is at times unintelligible to contemporary readers. For another, there are some mistakes which can be improved given the hundreds of years of biblical scholarship that have elapsed since it was produced.

Of the many revisions and fresh translations that have appeared since, space compels us to limit our present discussion to a few of the most noteworthy. Between 1881 and 1895, British scholars produced what is now known as the Revised Version, which mostly retained the wording of the KJV, but in sometimes updated its language and often improved its wording in places where scholarship had advanced since 1611. The RV is a clear improvement over the KJV in most important ways. To replace the KJV with the RV is a step forward.

Like the KJV, the RV is not covered under American copyright law.^[1] My comments about copyright law will generally limit themselves to American law, as it is the area with which I am most familiar. In that sense, the KJV and RV are both legally in the public domain -- they are the collective intellectual property of the world as a whole. Their publication cannot be limited or controlled by any particular group of persons. Anyone is free to copy or improve upon them.

It had been originally hoped that the production of the RV would be the result of a close collaboration between teams of translators on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the end the RV was more clearly the product of British scholarship, and did not incorporate many of the suggestions of American scholarship.

Using the RV as a basis, a team of American scholars produced what is now known as the American Standard Version, or ASV, which appeared in 1901. Likewise, I think it is fair to say that the ASV was generally an advance over the RV. Like the KJV and RV, the ASV is in the public domain -- it is the intellectual property of the world as a whole, and is not under the control of any particular organization.

The task of improving the English Bible was not completed with the ASV, however important a step the ASV was. Among other issues, the ASV continues to use for the most part the same archaic dialect of English found in the KJV, though without some of the most archaic expressions. Likewise, biblical scholarship has continued to make important advances since the time of the ASV, which ideally should be reflected in English translations.

While it is possible to draw a relatively straight line of progress KJV to RV to ASV, the history of translations becomes increasingly complex over time. A kind of splintering has occurred, in part due to copyright law. As of the year 2022, US copyright law provides that all works from 1926 and prior have entered the public domain. This means that, with some exceptions, translations made in 1927 and afterward are copyrighted -- instead of belonging to the English-speaking world at large, their reproduction and revision are the legal property of particular authors or organizations.

And so there are a wide variety of English translations in the hands of a wide variety of organizations: the NRSV (copyrighted to the National Council of Churches), NIV (Biblica), NLT (Tyndale House), ESV (Crossway), and so on. Rather than a generally recognized English Bible that is generally treated as the common property of English-speakers, instead a bewildering variety of translations appear. The wording particular to each is private property. Instead of an English Bible that is the product of an advancing scholarly consensus, one might say that the mass of modern translations are so many literary dead ends.

While I would not suggest that all this effort is worthless, certainly there is a degree of duplication, and something has been lost in terms of the Bible's position in English literature.

It is not quite correct to say that the field has been ceded completely to the copyrighted versions. There have been attempts to keep the Bible available in a public domain form.

The first noteworthy attempt along these lines, after the American Standard Version of 1901, is the World English Bible, the private effort of a missionary named Paul Johnson and certain unnamed volunteers who assisted him. It attempts to pick up where the ASV left off, modernizing the language and improving the sense where possible.

Its great strength is that it finally breaks with the archaic 'thee', 'thou', and archaic verb endings of the ASV, but still sticks for the most part closely to the ASV's word choices where they can be retained. In some ways it would be fair to say the WEB is a step forward.

But in some senses it is a miss-step. Rather than being the responsibility of a committee, as the KJV, RV, and ASV each were, the WEB was produced by one individual, whose sometimes idiosyncratic opinions create some problems. These include an uneven English style and a regression to a 'majority text' theory of textual criticism. The editor assures us that his rejection of modern textual criticism in favor of his preferred approach was mandated personally by God himself.

For those who are willing to rely on Mr. Johnson's personal interviews with the divine, I suppose the World English Bible will have to do. For those who are not willing to follow him along that path, and who might want something more in line with the results of mainstream scholarship, this means that the World English Bible is not yet a satisfactory translation. More work will be needed, carefully comparing every change the WEB has introduced, sifting through what represents a genuine improvement, and what is perhaps a step backward. There will be an element of the subjective in any such effort, but a carefully produced text, with its translation choices adequately document, might well be useful for the future development of the English Bible.

Some work in the direction of carefully sifting through and evaluating the WEB has been done by Wayne A. Mitchell, in his self-published New Heart English Bible. This consists of a derivative translation, still a work in progress, which attempts to improve on the World English Bible. The NHEB advances beyond the WEB in that it puts away the “Majority Text” approach to textual criticism and is committed to working within a critical text. Matters are somewhat complicated by the fact that Wayne Mitchell does not directly use any of the standard Hebrew or Greek texts, but instead has published his own critical editions of both, neither of which appears to have left any mark on the scholarly world.2

I am not entirely sure how useful or helpful Mitchell’s work is. Perhaps one day, after I have carefully looked through every difference between the ASV and WEB, I will find the time to look at every difference between the WEB and NHEB. For now, though, this project will most likely continue for some time to be primarily based on the ASV and WEB, with occasional reference to the NHEB in the notes. One advantage of proceeding in this way is that, as the NHEB continues to be a work in progress (its dates currently read 2007-2022 in the official online PDF of the NHEB), working primarily with the more settled ASV and WEB for now gives Mr. Mitchell the opportunity to continue perfecting his work.

In some places, neither the wording of the WEB or the ASV will be quite satisfactory, especially in places where the ASV is unsuitably archaic and the WEB has retained the archaism. I believe relief is close at hand for this problem as well, though. One of the pioneering efforts of modern biblical translation is The Old Testament: An American Translation, which will be falling into the public domain in 2023. I believe that in a great many cases wording borrowed from it will be able to happily remove remaining archaisms.

My aim in this work is to both produce and document the decision-making process behind another draft of the English Bible – one which aims to preserve the best features of both the ASV and WEB, and to improve upon both where possible.

I can think of no better approach then to simply begin with Genesis 1:1 and to address every meaningful difference between the ASV and WEB. Carrying out such a task in the most exhaustive possible way would push this whole project to the ridiculous – we do not need a full-blown discussion of every single time that the ASV reads ‘thine’ where the WEB has ‘yours’.

In order to avoid extremes of repetition, sometimes I will only note the first time that a particular sort of issue appears, and then note that not all future examples will be individually addressed. In two appendices, I will keep a list of the various types of repeated difference that do not warrant individual treatment for every passage. The first appendix, titled “Recurring Issues”, will treat certain topics, such as punctuation, verbal forms, and so on. The second appendix, “Recurring Words”, will be a list of individual words that come up repeatedly in the translation process, such as ‘Yahweh’ or ‘sky’. Barring the occasional mistake, every significant difference between the WEB, ASV, and my new translation will be documented, either under a heading in one of the appendices, or else individually at the affected passage.

The World English Bible is the product of years of gradual revision, and so it has existed in multiple states over time as it evolved. However, its producer now considers it to be a basically fixed text, and so when I refer to “WEB” I am referring to the WEB as it exists on the websites worldenglish.bible and ebible.org in 2022 or later. When I refer to the “ASV”, I am simply drawing for convenience on the ASV text that appears on the same websites. To the best of my knowledge, this ASV text is substantially identical to that published in 1901 by Thomas Nelson and Sons.

At times, the notes will compare the rendering choices made to various existing English translations. Unless otherwise noted, references to NIV, NLT, ESV, NKJV, NASB, CSB, HCSB, JPS (1917), NAB, NET, YLT, and NRSV are to those translations as they appear at biblehub.com.

For various reasons, there is as of yet no widely accepted critical text of the Hebrew Bible, although perhaps the work still in progress under the editorship of Ron Hendel will as yet fill that role. In the meantime, scholars typically make due with something like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, a diplomatic edition of the Masoretic Text with variant readings relegated to the footnotes. In a manner paralleling this, the near-universal practice in English translations of the Hebrew Bible has been to translate mostly from the Masoretic Text, departing from it on an ad hoc basis in cases where the Masoretic Text’s reading seems to be unsatisfactory.

This translation will follow in that same tradition. By default, it will use the same mostly-Masoretic textual base as the ASV and WEB use. If in some verse or phrase it seems clear that the text underlying the ASV and/or WEB is a later alteration, and where we can be reasonably certain as to what an earlier form of the text read, this upcoming translation may adopt that older reasoning, always with an explanatory footnote. Any new deviation from the Masoretic Text not found in the ASV will be footnoted.

So far (as of 10/20/22, at which time I am working on Genesis 49) the only places where I have introduced a new deviation from the Masoretic Text are at Genesis 2:20, 3:17, 3:21, 9:10, 49:24, 26, and possibly in 36:15-19 (see the notes for explanation). I follow the WEB in adopting a non-Masoretic reading not found in the ASV in Genesis 4:8 and 49:19-20. I follow both the ASV and WEB in adopting a non-Masoretic reading in Genesis 37:36, 41:57, and 43:32.

I would like to make one final note about myself. I am not qualified for a task like this. Please take this project for what it is -- just an interested amateur picking away at a job because I do not see any professionals giving it a go at the moment. It would be my hope that one day a committee of responsible professionals will undertake to produce a truly scholarly public domain Bible. But as long as the field is left to the amateurs, hopefully someone finds this contribution of some use.