SOURCE: Hammond, Gerald. “The Two Bibles of Miles Coverdale.” In Making of the English Bible,, pp. 68-88. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982.

[In following essay, Hammond discusses Coverdale's 1535 Bible and Great Bible, comparing them with each other and the Authorized Version of the Bible.]

But to saye the trueth before God, it was nether
my laboure ner desyre, to haue this worke put
in my hande: neuertheles it greued me that
other nacyons shulde be more plenteously
prouyded for with the scripture in theyr
mother tongue, then we: therefore whan I was
instantly requyred, though I coude not do so
well as I wolde, I thought it yet my dewtye
to do my best, and that with a good wyll.

from Coverdale's “Prologue” to his 1535 Bible

Because of Tyndale's incarceration and subsequent execution, the English Reformation Bible was completed by Miles Coverdale, a man we might fairly call the great survivor among the early translators. Born sometime around 1488, and from the first a participant in the radical theological groups which imported Lutheranism into the country, he completed one translation of the Bible in 1535, another in 1539, and probably helped in the production of the Geneva Bible during the late 1550s. He enjoyed, if that is the word for it, exile for his beliefs four times—in the late 1520s, the late 1530s, most of the 1540s, and the late 1550s. But unlike many of his radical contemporaries, he died in his bed. The definitive statement about his Bible translation was made by C. S. Lewis: as a scholar ‘he shows like a rowing-boat among battleships’, but as a creative artist he is the translator ‘whose choice of rendering came nearest to being determined by taste’. What Lewis means is that because Coverdale did not know Hebrew or Greek he was forced to choose between the versions of other translators, and that in the process of choosing he was largely guided by his own aesthetic judgment—and this, fortunately, was more than sound.

Coverdale's two Bibles are the subject of this chapter: the 1535 Coverdale Bible, whose importance lies in its being the first complete Bible printed in English; and the 1539 Great Bible, which was the first ‘authorized version’ of the scriptures. Large parts of the Great Bible show only minor alterations to his earlier version, but the Bible as a whole is important because of its influence on the English liturgy. Its version of the Psalms became the Prayer Book version. But let me begin with the Coverdale Bible; in particular, those parts of it which covered new ground.

Before his death Tyndale had completed the New Testament, the Pentateuch, the book of Jonah, and the historical books of the Old Testament (although these were not to appear until 1537). This leaves the Prophetic and Poetic books of the Old Testament, and it is in these books that we see Coverdale's creative translation at its freest, unaffected by any existing English version. The first thing to say about his work on these books is that it shows how far he intuitively grasped the essence of Hebrew poetry, even if his Hebrew scholarship was virtually non-existent. The Western world took another two hundred years to formulate the parallelistic nature of Old Testament poetry, in Robert Lowth's lectures de Sacra Poesi Hebraeōrum, but Coverdale found an English style which could sustain the syntactic and semantic patterning of the original. The prophetic books are full of such passages—take the Book of Micah as an example. Its first chapter clearly fails to impress a pattern on Coverdale. He knows that he is translating the words of a vehement prophet, and he attempts to convey the vehemence in his favourite way, by interpolating words and phrases like ‘yea’ and ‘for why’. But the result is a mess, close to incoherence. These are verses 5-13:

And all this shall be for the wickedness of Jacob, and the sins of the house of Israel.

But what is the wickedness of Jacob? Is not Samaria? Which are the high places of Juda? Is not Jerusalem? Therefore I shall make Samaria an heap of stones in the field, to lay about the vineyard. Her stones shall I cast into the valley and discover her foundations. All her images shall be broken down, and all her winnings shall be burnt in the fire. Yea, all her idols will I destroy: for why, they are gathered out of the hire of an whore, and into an whore's hire shall they be turned again. Wherefore I will mourn and make lamentation, bare and naked will I go. I must mourn like the dragons and take sorrow as the ostriches, for their wound is past remedy. And why? It is come into Juda, and hath touched the port of my people at Jerusalem already. Weep not, lest they at Geth perceive it.

Thou at Betaphra, welter thyself in the dust and ashes. Thou that dwellest at Sephir, get thee hence with shame. The proud shall boast no more for very sorrow; and why? Her neighbour shall take from her what she hath. The rebellious city hopeth that it shall not be so evil; but, for all that, the plague shall come from the Lord, even into the port of Jerusalem. The great noise of the chariots shall fear them that dwell at Lachis, which is an occasion of the sin of the daughter of Sion, for in thee came up the wickedness of Israel.

The Hebrew is not as symmetrical here as it is in other parts of the prophetic books, and Coverdale's translation reflects the stumblings around of his predecessors. Only occasionally does the parallelistic structure of the Hebrew poetic line peep through, and when it does it comes close to saving Coverdale's version. This is especially so in his rendering of part of verse 7: ‘they are gathered out of the hire of an whore, and into an whore's hire shall they be turned again’. Here Coverdale has reproduced exactly the pattern of the Hebrew—the contrast of antithetical verbs, ‘gather’ and ‘return’, with the virtually identical noun phrases, ‘the hire of an whore’ and ‘an whore's hire’—and a powerful rhythmic effect is helped by the chiastic word order where verb followed by its object is mirrored in the second half by the verb preceded by its object. But if you compare the way the same passage emerges from the hands of translators who have grasped the patterning of the original, that is the Authorized Version's rendering, then the contrast makes this look primitive, lacking both a clear idea of what the prophecy means or any rhythmic control to convey that meaning.

Had Coverdale always translated like this there would be little point in considering him here. But the later chapters of Micah show something different: how he gained a clear enough picture of the original through his sources to introduce into English the patterns and rhythms which mark the Authorized Version's translation of these books. Already the first two verses of the second chapter show a greater control:

Woe unto them that imagine to do harm, and devise ungraciousness upon their beds, to perform it in the clear day: for their power is against God. When they covet to have land, they take it by violence, they rob men of their houses.

Thus they oppress a man for his house, and every man for his heritage.

The Authorized Version's rendering is more accurate, but it succeeds no better in conveying the Hebrew parallelism, and its most distinctive phrases we can trace back to Coverdale:

Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds: when the morning is light they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand.

And they covet fields, and take them by violence, and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.

By verses 3-4 the boot is on the other foot—set against Coverdale the Authorized Version seems the more lacking in control, the less rhythmically sure:

COVERDALE:

Therefore thus sayeth the Lord: Behold, against this household have I devised a plague, whereout ye shall not pluck your necks. Ye shall no more go so proudly, for it will be a parlous time. In that day shall this term be used, and a mourning shall be made over you on this manner: We be utterly desolate, the portion of my people is translated. When will he part unto us the land that he hath taken from us?

AV:

Therefore thus sayeth the Lord: Behold, against this family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks, neither shall ye go haughtily: for this time is evil.

In that day shall one take up a parable against you, and a lament with a doleful lamentation, and say, We be utterly spoiled; he hath changed the portion of my people: how hath he removed it from me? Turning away, he hath divided our fields.

In Coverdale's version the chapter ends gloriously, moving from true Micah sarcasm to the assured parallelism of an inspired prophet-poet. These are the final three verses in the Coverdale Bible the Authorized Version and the New English Bible:

COVERDALE:

If I were a fleshly fellow, and a preacher of lies, and told them that they might sit bibbing and bowling and be drunken—Oh that were a prophet for this people!

But I will gather thee indeed, O Jacob, and drive the remnant of Israel all together. I shall carry them one with another, as a flock in the fold and as the cattle in their stalls, that they may be disquieted of other men.

Who so breaketh the gap, he shall go before. They shall break up the port, and go in and out at it. Their king shall go before them, and the Lord shall be upon the head of them.

AV:

If a man walking in the spirit of falsehood do lie, saying, I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink, he shall even be the prophet of this people.

I will surely assemble, O Jacob, all of thee: I will surely gather the remnant of Israel; I will put them together as the sheep of Bozra, as the flock in the midst of the field. They shall make great noise by reason of the multitude of men. The breaker is come up before them. They have broken up, and have passed through the gate, and are gone out by it, and their king shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.

NEB:

If anyone had gone about in a spirit of falsehood and lies, saying, ‘I will rant to you of wine and strong drink’, his ranting would be what this people like.

I will assemble you, the whole house of Jacob;
          I will gather together those that are left in Israel.
I will herd them like sheep in a fold,
like a grazing flock which stampedes at the sight of a man.
          So their leader breaks out before them,
and they all break through the gate and escape,
          and their king goes before them,
          and the Lord leads the way.

Here we can trace a total deterioration in the quality of the translation, significantly in inverse proportion to the degree of scholarly knowledge the translators possess. In verse 11 the Hebrew reads literally like this: ‘Man walking spirit and-falsehood he-lies I-will-prophesy to-you of-wine and-strong-drink and-he-will-be prophet this-people.’ Coverdale's is clearly the furthest from this in word-for-word accuracy, but much the closest in tone. The Authorized Version only manages to hint at the irony of tying the gift of prophecy to drunkenness, and has none of the relish of Micah's sarcastic thrust at the end of the verse—which Coverdale's ‘Oh that were a prophet for this people’ conveys so well. The New English Bible fares worse. Aware that the verb is not the normal one used for ‘prophesy’—nātap instead of nābā’—it goes for a more semantically accurate rendering, to ‘rant’. The result is nonsense, because it has the false prophet actually telling the people that he is a ranter—possibly an effective plea to some seventeenth-century Puritans, but one scarcely persuasive to a twentieth-century audience.

In verses 12-13 Coverdale sustains the metaphor of the people as a flock of sheep or herd of cattle more coherently than does the Authorized Version. In the latter ‘the breaker is come up before them’ is unnecessarily obscure when set against the straight-forwardness of Coverdale's ‘who so breaketh the gap, he shall go before’. The New English Bible keeps the metaphor's coherence too, but loses its cumulative effect: ‘their leader breaks out before them’ gives the game away too soon. The king is king from the start; in Coverdale's version, the king only becomes king because he is the first one to break through the gap.

In large parts of the Prophetic Books Coverdale's translation achieves a remarkable appreciation of the structure of the original Hebrew poetry. Look at his version of Isaiah 55:8-13. Its parallelism is so well organized that it cries out to be reproduced on the page:

For thus sayeth the Lord:
My thoughts are not your thoughts,
& your ways are not my ways;
But as far as the heavens are higher than the earth,
          so far do my ways exceed yours,
          & my thoughts yours;
& like as the rain and snow cometh down from heaven,
                                                  & returneth not thither again,
                                        but watereth the earth,
                                                            maketh it fruitful & green,
                              that it may give corn & bread unto the sower:
                                        so the word also that cometh out of my mouth
                                                  shall not turn again void unto me,
                              but shall accomplish my will
                                                  & prosper in the thing whereto I send it.
& so shall ye go forth with joy
& be led with peace:
                    the mountains and hills shall sing with you for joy,
all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands:
for thorns there shall grow fir trees //
                              // & the myrtle tree in the stead of briars;
& this shall be done to the praise of the Lord,
                              & for an everlasting token
                    that shall not be taken away.

The distinctiveness of Coverdale's rendering is all the more apparent if we compare it with one of his sources, the Vulgate, and with the Authorized Version. Both of these versions begin verse 8 with the parallelism, leaving ‘thus sayeth the Lord’ to the end—as the Hebrew does. But by moving it to the beginning Coverdale creates a poetic fluency, making sure that the poem is not obstructed when it has barely begun. In verse 9 Coverdale again differs from the Hebrew, and from the Vulgate and the Authorized Version, by varying the verbs: ‘are higher than’ is given a synonym ‘exceed’ (Vulgate ‘exaltantur’/‘exaltatae’; AV ‘are higher than’ twice). Coverdale was not to know that the normal Hebrew habit of using synonyms in the two halves of the parallel does not apply here—the original uses the verb gābāh twice—but his instinct is a good one, and his ability to find telling synonyms for verbs and nouns is a vital element in his translation of Hebrew poetry. It works well in verse 12, where he provides the direct and simple verb parallels of ‘go forth’ and ‘be led’, and noun parallels ‘joy’ and ‘peace’.

Coverdale's syntactic control shows well here. In verses 10 and 11 he succeeds best of the three versions in tying the two parts of the simile together. In the Authorized Version they are rendered: ‘For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven … So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth’ and in the Vulgate: ‘Et quando descendit imber, et nix de coelo … Sic erit verbum meum, quod egredietur de ore meo’. Neither has the compression of Coverdale's translation, in particular the parallel of his two ‘come’ verbs, and the matching of ‘down from heaven’ and ‘out of my mouth’. In verse 13 Coverdale also differs from the other two (and the Hebrew) by creating a syntactic chiasmus where ‘thorns’ and ‘briars’ stand at each end of the verse, with ‘fir trees’ and ‘myrtle trees’ mirroring each other. Finally, we should note the fine rhythmic line he creates in verse 12—‘and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands’—which goes unchanged into the Authorized Version.

Coverdale also set the style for the more gnomic books, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Here is his version of the preacher of Ecclesiastes inveighing against the vanity of human cupidity, in 5:10-12:

He that loveth money will never be satisfied with money, and who so delighteth in riches shall have no profit thereof. Is not this also a vain thing? Where as many riches are, there are many also that spend them away. And what pleasure more hath he that possesseth them, saving that he may look upon them with his eyes? A labouring man sleepeth sweetly, whether it be little or much that he eateth; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

Again, the comparison with the Authorized Version is worth making:

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

When goods are increased, they are increased that eat them; and what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes?

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

The Authorized Version translators are closer to the strictly literal meaning and syntax of the Hebrew, but their version is wooden and unconvincing when set beside Coverdale's; and when they want to round the verses off with a fine rhythmical close, they follow Coverdale word for word. To take one example of Coverdale's superiority, in verse 12 ‘saving the beholding of them with their eyes’ is the Authorized Version's rendering of a fairly compressed Hebrew clause, meaning literally ‘but only seeing his-eyes’. The verb is a participle, hence the Authorized Version's ‘beholding’. Coverdale changes the grammar a little, and produces an effective and scarcely less compressed rendering, with none of the unnecessary impersonality of the Authorized Version's equivalent. He renders it: ‘saving that he may look upon them with his eyes’. Both, though, are superior to the New English Bible's lifeless ‘and what advantage has the owner, except to look at them?’

In the Book of Proverbs Coverdale's renderings sometimes seem quaint or expansive in verses familiar to us from the Authorized Version, but not always without effect. Consider two fairly recognizable examples: ‘Presumptuousness goeth before destruction, and after a proud stomach there followeth a fall’ (16:18); and ‘An undiscreet son is the heaviness of his father, and a brawling wife is like the top of an house, where through it is ever dropping’ (19:14). But equally often Coverdale's rendering is striking, either because it is recognizably the source, sometimes word for word, of the Authorized Version's rendering, or because it presents us with an equally attractive alternative—if not a more attractive one. In chapter 23, for instance, he begins by missing the point entirely. Where the Authorized Version warns about sitting down to eat with a ruler—‘put a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite’—Coverdale merely has ‘measure thine appetite’. But in verses 5-7 he achieves a persuasively flexible warning against desire for riches and eating with the envious: less accurate, but more memorable than the Authorized Version's rendering of the verses.

COVERDALE:

Why wilt thou set thine eye upon the thing which suddenly vanisheth away? For riches make themselves wings, and take their flight like an eagle into the air. Eat not thou with the envious, and desire not his meat, for he hath a marvellous heart. He sayeth unto thee, Eat and drink, whereas his heart is not with thee.

AV:

Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings: they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.

Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats.

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: eat and drink, sayeth he to thee, but his heart is not with thee.

Later in the chapter, verse 13 goes directly into the Authorized Version, with only the dropping of ‘thereof’ from the end: ‘Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod he shall not die thereof.’ In verses 20-22 the most distinctive words of the Authorized Version's translation come directly from Coverdale.

COVERDALE:

Keep no company with wine bibbers and riotous eaters of flesh: for such as be drunkards and riotous shall come to poverty, and he that is given to much sleep shall go with a ragged coat. Give ear unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.

AV:

Be not amongst wine bibbers, amongst riotous eaters of flesh.

For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.

Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.

And then, in the memorable description of the whore in verses 27-8, Coverdale goes one better by giving a physical point to the comparison of her to a ditch and a pit. In fact he compares her to a grave and a pit—‘For an whore is a deep grave, and an harlot is a narrow pit’—and builds on this in the next verse with ‘She lurketh like a thief, and those that be not aware she bringeth unto her.’ It ought to be said, though, that the Authorized Version's finish to this verse, which has none of Coverdale's physicality—‘and increaseth the transgressors among men’—is much the truer to the Hebrew. Finally, Coverdale's description of the appearance and effects of wine matches anything achieved by later versions:

Where is woe? Where is sorrow? Where is strife? Where is brawling? Where are wounds without cause? Where be red eyes? Even among those that be ever at the wine, and seek out where the best is. Look not thou upon the wine, how red it is, and what a colour it giveth in the glass. It goeth down softly, but at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth as an adder.

I ought not go too far in praising Coverdale. By selective quotation it could be possible to make him appear the most expressive of the English Bible translators, and that would be a mistake. The pieces I have quoted here have been long enough to show that his achievements are not solitary flashes of inspiration: just as often, however, his lack of knowledge of the original makes his translation come close to gibberish. Compare his meaningless rendering of Isaiah 9:5 with the Authorized Version's splendidly impressionistic one:

COVERDALE:

Moreover, all temerarious and seditious power—yea where there is but a coat filled with blood—shall be burnt, and feed the fire.

AV:

For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.

Much his worst fault is his prolixity; again, compare his wordiness with the Authorized Version's pithy rendering of Proverbs 4:7:

COVERDALE:

The chief point of wisdom is, that thou be willing to obtain wisdom, and before all thy goods to get thee understanding.

AV:

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting, get understanding.

For all his weaknesses Coverdale can find ways of coping with problems which neither the Authorized Version's knowledge nor the New English Bible's scholarship have been able to resolve. One example is the notorious set of images connected with the bowels. It is, of course, a great cultural divide. Where the Hebrews set the seat of their emotions in their intestines, we find it hard to see them as anything more than the producers of waste matter—and this despite the bravely literal attempts of the Authorized Version translators. So, when Isaiah expresses the strength of his feelings about Moab, it is difficult to avoid our own cultural preconceptions about bowels sounding like harps: ‘Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kirharesh’ (Isaiah 16:11). The New English Bible, in its sophisticated way, decides that translation of an idiom like this requires a modern English idiomatic equivalent rather than a literal rendering. It finds one in the language of Woman's Own:

Therefore my heart throbs
          like a harp for Moab,
and my very soul for Kir-haraseth.

Go back to Coverdale and you find a much better idiomatic equivalent, its peculiar effect strengthened by his literal rendering of the place name at the end of the verse as ‘brick wall’:

Wherefore my belly rumbled, as it had been a lute, for Moab's sake; and mine inward members for the brick wall's sake.

Isaiah presents at least one further example of the power of Coverdale's translation to stop a reader in his tracks. In the Authorized Version chapter 18 opens with ‘Woe to the land shadowing with wings’. In his 1539 Great Bible Coverdale translated it as ‘O that land that trusteth under the shadow of wings’—which is a distinct revision of the way he had originally chosen to translate it in 1535: ‘Woe be to the land of flying ships’ (based, I assume, on the Vulgate's ‘Vae terrae cymbalo alarum’). Indeed, the first two verses of this chapter give me the opportunity to move on to the Great Bible, because they show up, as forcefully as any other two in the Bible, the degree of change which Coverdale was capable of making in only four years. The two versions are scarcely recognizable as having come from the same translator:

1535:

Woe be to the land of flying ships, which is of this side the flood of Ethiopia; which sendeth her message over the sea in ships of reeds upon the water, and saith: Go soon, and do your message unto a strange and hard folk, to a fearful people, and to a people that is further than this; to a desperate and peeled folk, whose land is divided from us with rivers of water.

1539:

O that land that trusteth under the shadow of wings, that land which is beyond the waters of Ethiopia; sending messengers by the sea, even in vessels of reeds over the water. Get you hence, ye speedy messengers, to a nation that is scattered abroad, and robbed of that they had, a fearful people from their beginning hitherto, a nation trodden down by little and little, whose land the floods have spoiled.

What has happened is that in the years between the two Coverdale has had access to the more scholarly Continental versions, in particular the Latin translation of Sebastian Muenster, the follower of Reuchlin, and the foremost German Hebraist of the period. We might well prefer the 1535 version as the more immediate and powerful of the two: the land of flying ships sets the tone well, and ‘a strange and hard folk’ is a splendidly direct description of the alien people, as is ‘a desperate and peeled folk’. By 1539 Coverdale had replaced these fairly vague terms with more specific ones, and it is his Great Bible rendering which provides the recognizable basis for the Authorized Version's—but notice, too, how the discarded ‘peeled’ has crept back in:

Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia:

That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled.

One noticeable rhythmic influence of the Great Bible is the word order it chooses for the phrase which, in 1535, had been translated ‘a strange and hard folk’. In the later version the Hebrew word order is preferred, with the noun coming first, and then its epithets: ‘a nation that is scattered abroad and robbed of that they had’. Partly, of course, this is the result of the new epithets not being single adjectives; now they do not readily fit before the noun. The Authorized Version's do, however, but the Hebrew word order is still preferred: ‘to a nation scattered and peeled’; and it is extended to the next phrases, ‘to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden down’. The second of these again follows the example of the Great Bible—‘a nation trodden down by little and little’.

These are not isolated examples. Many of the Great Bible's changes from the Coverdale Bible bring the English word order closer to that of the Hebrew. In Isaiah 5:17 Coverdale translates like this in his 1535 Bible: ‘Then shall the lambs eat their appointed fodder, and shall feed plenteously in the mountains.’ Now this is a poor translation—it gets the point the verse is making completely wrong. Isaiah is not here giving one of his prophecies of the coming state of universal peace, as you might imagine from Coverdale's rendering of this one verse. Instead it forms part of a prophecy of coming desolation, where the sheep wander at will. In the Great Bible Coverdale still does not get the meaning of the first half of the verse quite clear, but he does get the right translation for the second half and, significantly, gives his English the object-subject-verb order of the Hebrew: ‘Then shall the sheep eat in order, and the rich man's lands that were laid waste shall strangers devour.’

The Geneva Bible came between the Great Bible and the Authorized Version and, as we shall see, usually set the scholarly example for the 1611 translators to follow; but in this case the Authorized Version rejects its rendering and follows the word order which the Great Bible had employed:

GENEVA:

Then shall the lambs feed after their manner, and the strangers shall eat the desolate places of the fat.

AV:

Then shall the lambs feed after their manner, and the waste places of the fat ones shall strangers eat.

The Authorized Version did not invariably follow this lead; sometimes it preferred the natural English word order to the Hebraic one which the Great Bible had introduced. In Isaiah 28:17, for instance, Coverdale had translated the second half of the verse like this in 1535:

The tempest of hail shall take away your refuge, that ye have to deceive withal; and the overflowing waters shall break down your strongholds of dissimulation.

In the Great Bible he made this much less wordy and Hebraized the word order at the end of the verse; but here the Authorized Version preferred the Geneva Bible's example:

GREAT:

so that the hail shall take away your vain confidence as a broom, and the privy place of your refuge shall the waters run over.

GENEVA:

and the hail shall sweep away the vain confidence, and the waters shall overflow the secret place.

AV:

and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.

If we turn from word order to the words themselves, then it is possible to see Coverdale moving towards a greater understanding of the original in his Great Bible translation. His failures can be as interesting as his successes. In Isaiah 31:6 his 1535 rendering made little sense, and seemed to be directly derived from the Vulgate's ‘Convertimini sicut in profundum recesseratis, filii Israel’:

Therefore, O ye children of Israel, turn again, like as ye have exceeded in your going back.

In the Great Bible Coverdale's rendering does make sense:

Therefore, O ye children of Israel, turn again from that infidelity wherein you drowned yourselves.

Here the effective verb, ‘drowned yourselves’, is a translation of the Hebrew he‘smīqū, derived from the verb ‘āmāq, ‘to be deep’. But now it works as a dead metaphor which Coverdale has brought graphically to life. Its progress through the later English versions, as they ignore his efforts, is back to morbidity. Here are, respectively, the renderings of the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, and the Authorized Version:

O ye children of Israel, turn again, inasmuch as ye are sunken deep in rebellion.
Therefore, O ye children of Israel, turn again unto him whom ye have oft times forsaken.
Turn ye unto him from whom the children of Israel have deeply revolted.

One other attractive failure comes in the Great Bible's rendering of the words of the enticing harlot, described in Proverbs 7:18. In 1535 Coverdale has her saying, ‘Come, let us lie together, and take our pleasures till it be daylight’. This is not a bad rendering, although it seems to reverse the order of the phrases in the original; and ‘lie together’ is more a paraphrase than a translation of the Hebrew phrase which literally means ‘let-us-delight-ourselves in-love’. But four years later Coverdale seems to have decided that his first effort was deficient, and he added a third appeal to her entreaties to lie together and take pleasures till daylight, ‘and will enjoy the pleasures of love’. No other English version created quite so sensual a harlot.

The same chapter, however, gives a good opportunity for us to see how Coverdale's changes often brought the Great Bible closer to the original than his 1535 version had been. This comes with the introduction of the harlot in verses 10-12. Coverdale had originally described her like this:

And behold, there met him a woman in an harlot's apparel—a deceitful, wanton, and unsteadfast woman, whose feet could not abide in the house: now is she without, now in the streets, and lurketh in every corner …

Again, this is not a bad translation. It communicates well the narrative thrust of the tale, with the switch from past to present tense, and the adjectives used about her—deceitful, wanton, unsteadfast—give an impressively definitive description of a prostitute. Set against it, the New English Bible's rendering lacks life:

Suddenly a woman came to meet him,
dressed like a prostitute, full of wiles,
flighty and inconstant,
a woman never content to stay at home,
lying in wait at every corner,
now in the street, now in the public squares.

Here we can see, in one phrase, the great gulf between the sixteenth-century translator and the modern one. The Hebrew—and Coverdale's sources—have as part of her description the graphic idiom ‘in-her-house they-will-not dwell her-feet’; or, as Coverdale puts it, ‘whose feet could not abide in the house’. But the modern translator insists on removing the image: he translates not what the phrase says, but what it means—here, ‘never content to stay at home’—and, in doing so, he loses the strength of the original. In his Great Bible rendering Coverdale improved on his earlier version:

And behold, there met him a woman with open tokens of an harlot, only her heart was hid. She was full of loud words and ready to dally, whose feet could not abide in the house: now she is without, now in the streets, and layeth a bait in every corner.

He has kept the immediacy of his first translation, but has now introduced two clever contrasts. The first is between the harlot's hidden heart—in 1535 this phrase had been left untranslated—and her ‘open tokens’ of harlotry. The Hebrew word used here means a ‘garment’. Coverdale's ‘token’ has this sense, but also implies something more earthy than that—as John Skelton put it in The Tunning of Elinour Rumming:

There came an old ribibe,
She halted of a kibe,
And had broken her shin
At the threshold coming in,
And fell so wide open
That one might see her token …

The second contrast is between her readiness ‘to dally’ in the street and her unwillingness to dally at home. And, finally, Coverdale pictures her as a huntress, laying baits in every corner—an even more effective image than his original ‘lurketh in every corner’.

Often the Great Bible's improvements are simply to get right what the Coverdale Bible got wrong. Isaiah 21:4 reads like this in his first version: ‘Mine heart panted, I trembled for fear. The darkness made me fearful in my mind.’ This is simple and effective, but an inadequate reflection of the Hebrew, where the second half of the verse talks about turning a night of pleasure into a night of fear. In the Great Bible Coverdale puts this right: ‘My heart panted, fearfulness came upon me. The night of my voluptuousness hath he turned against me into fear.’ Together with this type of improvement, we generally see the Great Bible showing a greater sense of the rhythm of the original. A famous verse in Isaiah, 2:4, appears like this in the Coverdale Bible:

… and shall give sentence among the heathen, and shall reform the multitude of people: So that they shall break their swords and spears, to make scythes, sickles, and saws thereof.

From that time forth shall not one people lift up a weapon against another, neither shall they learn to fight from thenceforth.

By 1539 minor syntactic changes have been made and the rhythms of the Authorized Version's rendering have begun to appear:

… and shall give sentence among the heathen, and shall reform the multitude of people. They shall break their swords also into mattocks, and their spears to make scythes. And one people shall not lift up a weapon against another, neither shall they learn to fight from thenceforth.

Its rhythms in the Psalms are the Great Bible's main influence on the English Protestant tradition. This is a little ironic since Coverdale made relatively few changes to his earlier rendering of the Psalms, and often the Great Bible psalm is virtually the same as that of the Coverdale Bible. C. S. Lewis has claimed that in 1539 we find ‘change after change which so improves the rhythm that one might suppose it made for that purpose alone’; and he cites as examples the change from ‘His leaves shall not fall off’ to ‘His leaf also shall not wither’ (1:4), from ‘Why do the heathen grudge’ to ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage together’ (2:1), and the expansion of ‘How long? to ‘How long wilt thou punish me?’ (6:3). Two of these are not entirely convincing examples: I do not find the second any kind of rhythmic improvement, nor the third, where Coverdale's original rendering brilliantly conveys the plaintiveness of the psalmist's plea: ‘My soul also is in great trouble, but Lord how long?’

In this case the Great Bible's expansion is unwarranted—the Hebrew says simply ‘ad mātay, i.e. ‘how long?’—and it completely loses the abruptness of the original. Its source, as it is the source for almost all of the Great Bible's changes in the Psalms, is Muenster's version, which translates the verse: ‘Et anima mea turbata est valde: et tu domine usque quo (affligis me?)’ Lewis was right to claim that some of the changes in the Great Bible Psalter improved the rhythm, but he made too much of them. In verse after verse the majority of our familiar rhythms had already been created by Coverdale in 1535. This, for example, is his original version of Psalm 137:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein. Then they that led us away captive required of us a song and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Sion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth. Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of Jerusalem, how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground. O daughter Babylon, thou shalt come to misery thyself. Yea, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones.

For the Great Bible the only major changes which Coverdale made were in verses 5 and 8. In 5 he made the second half of the verse take the form we are most familiar with—‘let my right hand forget her cunning’—and in 8 the daughter of Babylon's fate is described more succinctly as ‘wasted with misery’. The second of these is a little closer to the Hebrew, which has the one word hashdūdāh, ‘ruined’, but the first has no warrant whatsoever in the Hebrew: Coverdale's original translation is much the closer. The Great Bible's rhythm may be better here—and the Authorized Version took it over word for word, but it is an invention, not a translation.

The Authorized Version's readiness to take over the Great Bible interpolation in Psalm 137 raises a crucial point about the Psalms in the English Bible: of all the books of the Bible, the Psalter is the least in touch with the original text. This is a matter of familiarity—in the Authorized Version's case it is familiarity with the Great Bible version in the Book of Common Prayer. Even as early as the Wyclif Bible the translators realized that their task was unusually difficult in translating this book: the Wyclif Preface actually warns its readers that here the Latin version they are translating from differs radically from the original text. The much more scholarly Authorized Version translators made their compromises here too, with the result that their great rhythmic effects in the Psalms are not really the Hebrew's so much as they are the creation of Miles Coverdale. In Psalm 137, for instance, it is probable that the Authorized Version would otherwise have followed its normal practice in verse 4, by rendering a Hebrew construct with the noun+of+noun form, that is not ‘the Lord's song’ but ‘the song of the Lord’. And in verse 6, against its normal practice, Coverdale's word order is preferred to the Hebrew, which actually opens the verse with the Psalmist exhorting his tongue to cleave to the roof of his mouth. We might go further and say that the Psalms is the one book where the Authorized Version sometimes anglicizes what previously had been Hebraic. There are two good examples in this psalm, in verse 3. The Authorized Version renders it:

For they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

Three interpolations are signalled by the Authorized Version's italics; the first two are unnecessary, as Coverdale's rendering shows. The reason for their introduction is not difficult to see: ‘required of us’ creates a rhythmic and semantic balance, and ‘saying’ prevents an unexpected transition from one speaker to the other, something which might obstruct the rhythmic flow of the verse.

The influence of Coverdale's 1535 Bible is probably stronger in the Psalms than anywhere else. Consider the Great Bible rendering—and therefore the familiar Prayer Book version—of the opening of Psalm 62:

My soul truly waiteth still upon God, for of him cometh my salvation.

He verily is my strength and my salvation; he is my defence, so that I shall not greatly fall.

How long will ye imagine mischief against every man? Ye shall be slain all the sort of you, yea, as a tottering wall shall ye be, and like a broken hedge.

Their device is only how to put him out whom God will exalt; their delight is in lies; they give good words with their mouth, but curse with their heart.

These four verses, by no means straightforward in the Hebrew, are almost unchanged from Coverdale's earlier 1535 rendering. The only difference of any importance is due to his original failure to give any translation for the clause he later translated as ‘whom God will exalt’. But the vocabulary is otherwise the same, and, strikingly, so is the syntax of verse 3; and it is equally striking to see how much of Coverdale's original version makes its way into the 1611 text.

Again, I ought not to push the argument too far. By following Muenster in his Great Bible, Coverdale did rescue some poor translations. In Psalm 88:10, for instance, the Great Bible has the marvellously stark parallel:

Dost thou show wonders among the dead? Or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee?

Originally he had translated it like this:

Dost thou show wonders among the dead? Can the physicians raise them up again, that they may praise thee?

And in Psalm 130:6 his 1535 rendering was uninspiring:

My soul doth patiently abide the Lord, from the one morning to the other.

In the Great Bible it takes on life:

My soul flieth unto the Lord before the morning watch; I say, before the morning watch.

Still it would be unfair to claim that the English Psalms derive their strength from Coverdale's following of one Continental scholar. He had, four years earlier, already created some of our most memorable biblical verses.