The King James Bible and the World It Made

The King James translation of the Bible ushered in a new eloquence that until 1611 had not existed in the English language. Four centuries later, the literary and historical power of this Bible continues to awe. Originally conceived to help unify Protestants during the English Reformation, many of the Bible's phrases still saturate popular prose—as evidenced by sayings such as "an eye for an eye" and Abraham Lincoln's famous "a house divided against itself," and even in the intonations of M...