CELEBRATING ADULTERY AND GOD’S GREAT ASS
Exodus 20:14 | Deut. 5:24
WARNING: One typo can mess up a commandment, plus TMI on YHWH’s posterior
CONTEXT: In this version of the KJV, adultery is not a problem
According to a 17th Century reprint of the King James Version of the Bible, thou shalt commit adultery. The error, which was by all accounts an honest mistake, came at a particularly awkward segment of the Old Testament, commonly known as the Ten Commandments or Decalogue.
“Thou shalt commit adultery” – Seventh Commandment, “Wicked Bible” (1731)
Also known to posterity as the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners’ Bible, the 1631 edition was issued by the king’s own royal printers, Robert Barker and Martin Lewis. The guilty parties were subsequently called before the High Commission and fined £300 (about $85,000 today) and deprived of their printing license. The Archbishop of Canterbury was not amused. But many others have been.
Shockingly, there was another egregious error in the same edition: in Deuteronomy 5:24 the word “great-asse” was substituted for “greatness, so that the passage read: “Behold, the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.”
While we must acknowledge the unfortunate aspects of the erroneous term, it is also accurate to note that the Creator is likely to have a holy caboose that is large and aesthetically superior or most likely, both.
There is a long list of other errors over the past couple of millennia, some more amusing than others. For example.
In the “Fools Bible” from 1763, Psalm 14:1 reads “the fool hath said in his heart there is a God,” rather than “the fool hat said in his heart there is no God.” The printers were fined £3,000 and all copies ordered destroyed.
There are several fundamentalist Protestant denominations which insist that salvation can only be attained through the scriptures in the King James Version, and that all other translations are corrupt. This aversion is at it’s core anti-papist in nature. The fact that the ancient Hebrews didn’t speak English (because it didn’t exist) is just one of the many quibbles a reasonable person might have with this point of view. By the 17th century, the Old Testament had been translated through at least four other languages, one or more of which did not have vowels or punctuation.
The other awkward detail is that King James himself – who commissioned and paid for the KJV – had at least three romantic affairs with handsome male “favorites.” This is a problem rarely addressed by the intensely homophobic Southern Baptists and other evangelicals.1
“Behold, the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.”
– “Fools Bible” from 1763, Psalm 14:1
NOTES:
- Many evangelical denominations maintain that the King James Version [KJV] and only that translation holds the path to salvation. Other editions are tainted by Papists and other undesirable denominations..
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