Tyndale's Old Testament

In the 1530s William Tyndale translated the first fourteen books of the Old Testament into English from the original Hebrew a translation that laid the foundation of all subsequent English bibles including the celebrated Authorized Version (King James Bible) of 1611. Tyndale was the first to translate the Hebrew Bible into Englishthe 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 Tyndales 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. Tyndale translated and printed the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) in 1530 as a pocket book revising Genesis in 1534. He also translated and printed the Book of Jonah probably in 1531. In addition there is now little doubt that after translating the Pentateuch Tyndale went on to translate the historical books of the Old TestamentJoshua to 2 Chroniclesfor there is overwhelming evidence that those books as they appeared in the 1537 "Matthews" Bible were Tyndales work. The present volume contains the Pentateuch (unavailable now except in an out-of-print and unreliably edited Victorian facsimile) and the historical books which have not been in print since 1551 and are of great importance both to scholars and to the general reader. The spelling in the texts has been modernized to show them as the modern productions they once were and Tyndales introductions and marginal notes are included. David Daniells introduction explores Tyndales astonishing achievement in single-handedly turning the Hebrew into English of great variety force and beauty.