Journal: Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society
Volume: JOTGES 06:1 (Spring 1993)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JOTGES 6:2 (Spring 93) p. 69

Book Reviews

Tyndale’s Old Testament: Being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah. Trans. by William Tyndale. In a modern-spelling edition and with an introduction by David Daniell. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. 643 pp. Cloth, $40.00.

Since everything the Grace Evangelical Society believes and practices and this journal promotes is firmly based on the Holy Bible, and for practical purposes of reaching the masses, on conservative English translations in the Tyndale-King James tradition, it is only just that we give an adequate review of this large and elegant volume. It is the companion to the NT edition reviewed in the Spring 1990 issue of JOTGES, also edited by David Daniell.

We can hardly do better than to quote from the concise summary of Tyndale’s contribution to OT scholarship (and evangelical truth) on the front flap of the dust jacket: “Tyndale was the first to translate the Hebrew Bible into English—the first, in fact, to translate anything from Hebrew into English. At the time, that language was virtually unknown in England, and Tyndale had learned his excellent Hebrew while he was exiled to the Low Countries and Germany for political reasons. The publication of Tyndale’s Old Testament, on top of his earlier and later translations of the New Testament, outraged the clerical establishment by giving the people access to the word of God in English. Tyndale was hunted down and subsequently burned at the stake for blasphemy.”

For comparison, here is Gen 3:1–7 in three versions, in the 1539 Tyndale (Tyndale’s original spelling and what little punctuation there is are copied from the frontispiece to this book), in the 1611 King James (the original spelling and punctuation of the 1611 KJV are from the 1982 Thomas Nelson reprint of it), and in the 1985 New King James:

JOTGES 6:2 (Spring 93) p. 70