How Hebrew Helped to Create the English Language—and to Form the American Spirit

“They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. . . . The properties of the Hebrew tongue agree a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.”

—William Tyndale, Preface to The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528)

With these words, the Protestant scholar William Tyndale signaled the start of a special relationship between the Hebrew and English languages. His 1530 rendering of the Pentateuch, the first-ever English translation from the Hebrew, would provide the fabric for the 1611 King James Bible and inject a Hebraic quality into the syntax and phraseology of English literary and religious usage without parallel in any European culture.

In the 50 years before Tyndale, 22 Bible translations had appeared in European vernaculars. (England lagged behind because its bishops forbade alternatives to the Church-approved Latin translation known as the Vulgate.) The Continental translators, all associated with the Protestant Reformation, strove to capture the sense of the original Hebrew and Greek. Their German or French versions were not meant to sound Hebraic, but rather to render the meaning of the text as closely as possible in idiomatic French or German. Tyndale, however, who was well aware of these Continental efforts, strove for more.