10 - The King James Bible

Summary

The excluded scholar: Hugh Broughton

Other issues of importance were raised by one of the most eminent English Hebrew scholars of the time, Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). Although he was not included among the King James translators, he gave them the benefit of his advice. Moreover, he had been an advocate of a new translation long before the proposal was made that initiated the KJB, and among his many publications were several translations of OT books. Whatever he wrote was forcefully if not clearly expressed (the DNB aptly speaks of his ‘quaint oracular dogmatism’). His domineering outspokenness, his rigidity of ideas and his contentiousness (he was at odds with several of the translators) might give good reason for his exclusion from a translation by committees, but the same qualities, together with his undoubted weight of knowledge, meant that his arguments about translation were as familiar to the KJB translators as anyone's. This gives him a real claim to our interest, even if his arguments appear generally to have been rejected. He has a further claim in that he is the biblical scholar writing in English at this time who gives most attention to literary questions.

He believed in the divinely inspired infallibility and perfection of both Testaments (but not of the Apocrypha). So, writing in connection with the work then being done on the KJB, he declares, ‘the Old Testament is all written in the Jew's tongue, and God's style passing all man's wit, and maketh up one body, having not one word idle or wanting’.