A right royal laugh
Well now, here’s a first. The Bible just made me laugh. It’s a fine read, the Bible. If you leave out the supernatural stuff, the begat stuff, and the rules stuff – no shellfish or sodomy on the Sabbath – it’s full of wise and lovely words.
‘‘For dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.’’ ‘‘Hath the rain a father?’’ ‘‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine; but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’’
Take the superstition out of it and the Good Book’s a good book. But it’s not generally thought funny.
For a long time The Bible was almost the only book.
First printed in English in the 16th century, it was the one book the literate were sure to have read and the illiterate to have heard read.
Such was its pre-eminence that its images entered the everyday language.
So if you speak of a lamb to the slaughter, or a fly in the ointment, you’re quoting the Bible.
If you go the extra mile or you fight the good fight or you rise and shine you’re quoting the Bible.
If you escape by the skin of your teeth or if you live by the sweat of your brow or if you go by the letter of the law, it’s the Bible you are quoting. And whether you consider the fruit of your loins to be the salt of the earth or a thorn in the flesh, you are quoting, in either case, whether you realise it or not, the Bible.
The language we use shapes our mental furniture.
So the Bible has influenced every speaker of English, even if he’s never read a word of it.
And the translation of the Bible that did the influencing is the King James version.
It dates from the first decade of the 17th century, the decade in which Shakespeare wrote King Lear.
So rich, fresh and muscular was the language then that even a committee could write.
Forty-seven scholars contributed to the King James Bible and what they came up with was a masterpiece. But not, it is generally thought, a comic one.
There have been many translations of the Bible since. None compare.
You may remember the Good News Bible that emerged to great fanfare when I was a child and was supposed to bring the Bible into the 20th century.
Here’s how it rendered the dust passage: ‘‘You were made from soil and you will become soil again.’’
It’s the Playdough theory of existence. You have to laugh, but at it, rather than with it.
Laughing with the Bible is rare because people take religion so seriously. But in the lavatory this morning, reading a book about literary devices, I came across a passage from the first Book of Kings and there on the throne of my bestial nature I hooted like an owl.
The passage was quoted as an illustration of anti-climax, but it is far more than that.
If you don’t find it funny, I can’t help. A joke explained never made anyone laugh.
But it seems to me that these 50 words contain more comic truth about the nature of human life than any sermon.
And they’re two and a half thousand years old. The subject is a great king called Asa.
‘‘The rest of all the acts of Asa, and all his might, and the cities which he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? Nevertheless in the time of his old age he was diseased in his feet.’’
So rich, fresh and muscular was the language then that even a committee could write.