The Old Testament: Introduction by George Steiner

by Everyman's Library, George Steiner (Introduction)

The King James Version of the Bible, first published in 1611, has been the favorite of English readers for centuries. This Everyman's Library edition of The Old Testament also contains George Steiner's introduction which reminds us of the literary grandeur, uniqueness, and centrality of the Bible.  "What you have in hand is not a book. It is the book.  That, of course, is what 'Bible' means.  It is the book which, not only in Western humanity, defines the concept of a text.  All our other books, however different in matter or method, relate, be it indirectly, to this book of books... "All other books, be they histories, narrations of the imaginary, codes of law, moral treatises, lyric poems, dramatic dialogues, theological-philosophic meditations, are like sparks, often, to be sure, distant, tossed by an incessant breath from a central fire.  In the Western condition, but also in other parts of the planet to which the 'Good Book' has been taken, the Bible largely informs our historical and social identity... "No other book is like it; all other books are inhabited by the murmer of that distant source." Steiner underlines, as well, our great good fortune in being able to read the Bible—which has been translated in whole or in part into more than two thousand languages—in the resplendent language of seventeenth-century England.  "This is the instrument of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Bacon, of Donne and the young Milton.  It encompasses the organblasts of the Queen's rhetoric, Sidney's intimacies of desire, the 'lapidary lightness' of Ben Jonson, and the compaction of the early Metaphysical poets.  It can command, seduce, enchant, and think aloud as never before or since...There could not have been a moment, a climate of feeling and general discourse, more apt to engender the two foremost constructs in the Shakespeare and the King James Version."

1856 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 5, 1996

About the author

Everyman's Library is a series of reprints of classic literature, primarily from the Western canon.

The Library was conceived in 1905 by London publisher Joseph Malaby Dent, whose goal was to create a 1,000-volume library of world literature that was affordable for, and that appealed to, every kind of person, from students to the working classes to the cultural elite.

By 1910, 500 books had been published under the Everyman trademark, and in 1956, fulfilling Dent's original goal—the thousandth volume, Aristotle's Metaphysics, having been selected for the honour, was published.