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THE OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVE

SEPARATED OUT, SET IN CONNECTED ORDER AND EDITED

NARRATIVE

SEPARATED OUT, SET IN CONNECTED ORDER,
AND EDITED

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PREFACE

THIS book offers substantially the entire Old Testament narrative, arranged in its due sequence as a history of Israel from the earliest times to the rededication of the temple by the Maccabees. Passages which in the received text are duplicated it gives but once; parallel versions of the same tradition it gives together, setting the later or less interesting one in a footnote. In editing this narrative for the school and the general reader, I have assumed that two considerations should be uppermost : (1) the translation should do it justice as literature; (2) footnotes should give only such matters of fact as either explain the text or supplement it.

66

The former consideration almost requires the use of the King James version, which is still unapproached as at once a rendering of an ancient text and an English prose classic. I must disclaim, however, the kind of veneration that seems to take literally Jowett's remark about it as more inspired than the original." No "literary" study of the Bible is worth considering which does not aim at appreciating what its original writers meant; and what they meant and wrote often does not appear in the King James translation. The traditional Hebrew text from which both the King James and the Revised versions were made, is in scores of passages-especially in the important books of Samuel -obscured by the accumulated copyists' errors of centuries. Where the work of modern textual scholarship has made it possible to remove such errors, it is no longer excusable to pass them on to future readers. I have therefore cut out palpable glosses, restored (in 1 Sam. xiv. 41 and elsewhere) original readings that have dropped out of the Hebrew but are preserved in the Greek, and used corrected renderings where the received version is seriously misleading. Most of these changes, putting, for example, 'asherah' for 'grove,' 'Edom' for 'Syria' (Aram), 'oak' for 'plain,' etc., can hardly be said to affect the style, except as they make for clearness; and they give a text which, I hope, will deliver the average reader from his present dilemma between a correct but non-literary translation, and a literary one which requires continual recourse to a commentary. Two minor passages I have omitted as not of enough value to

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