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Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 83, 4 October 1930, Page 21

ONE BIBLICAL SMILE

IN THE AMERICAN R.V.

PIETY AND "JESTING"

[By "Ajax."]

:: Apropos of the laughter of the Bible 1 T' pointed out last week what an immense improvement some of the Re- , visers had desired to makn in the unintelligible first line of Job xxix. 24: If I laughed on them they believed it not; And the light of my countenance they cast not down. In the text of the E.V. the verse is reproduced unaltered, but a note in the ..margin .gives. . ■• ■ .••-.-■ '•'■ I smiled on them when they had no V - confidence as an alternative rendering of tho first line. On further consideration it ''■', seems to nic that I was wrong in as- ,: suming that a majority of the, Re- ;; visers must have preferred this render-ing-in order to get it a place in the i margin, but it is certain that any number short of a two-thirds majority could not put it in the test. ■'...# # • ;' • . Two small points may be added , to what' I made last week. In tris "Modern Header's Bible" Professor E. G. Moulton has followed the R.V. throughout, but he sometimes incorporates in his test the alternatives which the Revisers had . put in the margin. It therefore surprised me very much to find that in this case Moulton has preferred the unintelligible first line, including the seriously misleading "laughed on," to _ the marginal alternative. * .*. * ■ ..* ' The American Bevisers also had at first • taken the same course. At the end of tlia Revised version of the 0.T., which was published in London in ;J.885, is au Appendix introduced as : follows: — The American Old Testament Revision Company, while recognising the cordial acceptance given to many of their suggestions, present the following instances im which they differ from the English Company, as of sufficient importance to he' appended to the Revision in accordance with the original agreement. The American Bevisers, who were at first handicapped by an agreement not to publish a text incorporating their preferences for 14 years, derived this ultimate advantage from the handicap —that instead of disbanding, , as the English company did shortly after, the completion of the original work, they had an inducement to hold together in anticipation of the time when they ■would be free to publish as they pleased. *.* # * On the expiry of the 14 years the American Company accordingly ( went far beyond a mere. incorporation of the Appendix in their text. They revised the Appendix itself, introduced a number, of emendations which for the sake Df compromise aud expedition had previously been omitted, and reviewed ,_ their differences with the English Revisers from a position of complete independence. The Revised Version, "'newly edited by tho American Revision Committee A.D. 1901," has therefore some great advantages over the E.V. which, with its -American Appendix, appeared in 1885. The preface in •which the reasons for the changes are discussed is interesting and valuable. Even the mere mechanical advantages of shorter paragraphs and continuous topical headings at the tops of ' the pages are a great help and comfort to the reader, and the Oxford and Cam- , bridge University Presses, which have ' been seeking to remedy the unpopularity of the B.V. by the reactionary '■ measure of restoring the verse divisions, would do well to follow this ex;eellent lead. .•■' . ■ .*. » *■ .■ • ' One of the American Eevisers' sec- : .ond thoughts was that the alternative translation of Job xxix. 24 should be transferred from the margin to the text; and,l-was very glad to see that they had done so without providing any perverse reader with the chance of getting muddled over an impossible alternative in the margin. The smile of kindliness has been substituted for ■what appeared to be the laugh of scorn, and the Bible, which outside the Apocrypha had no smiles at all, has at last been given ona.

What he takes to be Job's habit of : smiling upon or jesting with _ his i friends is used by one of the wisest ana wittiest of Biblical commentators as the text for some excellent remarks " on the relations of piety and humour. '- John Trapp, the Puritan divine of the - seventeenth century, who covered the : -whole Bible in five quarto volumes ' single-handed, writes as.follows on this verse: 'Ingenii fructus tenuissimus est risus" (laughter is the slenderest product of the intellect), saith Tully (de Orat. Jib. 2). .To break a jest is no such witty thing as men conceit it. Howbeit, a harmless jest (that hath nothing in it which may • justly grieve or offend another) may very well consist with piety and. Christian gravity; whatever some sour -Anabaptists have held to the contrary. Jocularity indeed and scurrility are strictly forbidden, and reckoned among those "ta anekonta" things that conduce not to the main end of bur lives, Eph. V.4. But Socrates would be very merry when he liked .his company, yet so as that his mirth should be gome way profitable, said Xenophon, lib. 4, de Diet, et Fact. (Socr.) And Erasmus did the Papists more prejudice by his jesting, saith a grave author, than Luther did by his stomaching and storming. • ♦ « * Trapp, whose commentary appeared ia the 16505, is, it will be seen, a.de- / lightfni writer. His combination, of piety with humour, and of learning and sometimes too learned Latinisms and Graeciflms with the old peasant speech of the Midlands, make his book one ©£ the most entertaining in the language. Here, from his note on the same verse, is a striking colloquialism which I have been unable to trace: They despised not mine authority, they reverenced me no whit the less (Vatablus) . . . neither would they be so bold and so bob with me as to return jest for jest, as if I had been their compeer and hail-fellow well met. •■ Job is made to speak, first, the language of the learned Vatablus, and then that of the Gloucestershire peasants or the citizens of Stratford-on-Avon, which was Trapp's market-town. Where else can he have picked up that charming expression, "so bold and so bob"1 .•■ * • * » No less than 15 articles,; covering five columns, are given by the "Oxford Dictionary" to the word "bob" and the "Dialect Dictionary" gives it four columns. Yet a fairly diligent search fails to reveal the phrase "bold and bob" in cither of these books. The nearest approach seems to be made by the adverbial use ■which is attributed to Marvoll in 1673: Turn over the leaf and you meet full bob, "Reverendissimo in Christo Patri (sic) et Domino." The adjective, like the adverb, seems 'Jnt«Ede& to suggest the sudden, action

which is commonly represented. by the verb.

Though quite unprepared to accept a brief for those "sour Anabaptists" who denied that "a harmless jest may very well consist with piety and Christian gravity." I must confess to great sympathy with their trouble insofar as it was based upon the text to which Trapp refers—Eph. V.4:

Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor .jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks.

It is" not filthy or foolish jesting, but jesting, that is on the face ■of it hit by these words, and what right has Trapp or anybody elso to insert an epithet which the apostle omitted?' And what kind of jesting is allowed if, as Trapp says,-"jocularity" is forbidden? And what has the "giving of thanks" to do with it?