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God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
#UB4372
Paperback, 281 pages; 2005 (2003)
$13.95
 Members' Price: $11.86
The translation these men made together can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English. That it should be the creation of a committee of people no one has ever heard of——and who were generally unacknowledged at the time——is the key to its grandeur. It is not the poetry of a single mind, nor the effusion of a singular vision, nor even the product of a single moment, but the child of an entire culture stretching back to the great Jewish poets and storytellers of the Near Eastern Bronze Age.
God's Secretaries vividly transports the reader to Jacobean England, revealing how that particular time and place fostered the creation of the King James Bible. The details Adam Nicolson has mined about the process by which the translation was accomplished, the personalities involved, and the Zeitgeist of the moment make this slice of history utterly fascinating. Packed with intriguing elements of religion and literature, as well as history, God's Secretaries is an eminently readable treat.
(CH)
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