Books, Arts & Manners: Holy (sort of) Scripture (sort of)

The Bible, arranged and edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates, with updated scholarship and a new introduction by Lodowick Allison (Simon & Schuster, 1,254 pp., $25)

THE BIBLE that Simon & Schuster has just released is a new version of an old book— but not the old Book you may have in mind. It is, instead, an updated version of the expurgated Bible that an author, critic, and former English professor named Ernest Sutherland Bates published with the same company in 1936. Bates’s version, Lodowick Allison explains in his helpful introduction, was intended “to be read as a book,” and to this end Bates eliminated the enumeration of chapters and verses as well as “the double column format, separated the stories, poems, and songs from the text, introduced quotation marks, and modernized spellings.” Mr. Allison, a former publisher of NR, correctly concludes that “the result is refreshing to the eye accustomed to the dense typography of most editions of the Bible” and points out that many of Bates’s innovations “have now been copied by new translation” that have appeared over the past three decades, For good reason, since with the exception of the elimination of chapter and verse (which makes it impossible to give standard references) these rather mechanical changes are eminently sensible.

JL

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Jon D. Levenson

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The Bible, arranged and edited by Ernest Sutherland Bates, with updated scholarship and a new introduction by Lodowick Allison (Simon & Schuster, 1,254 pp., $25)

THE BIBLE that Simon & Schuster has just released is a new version of an old book— but not the old Book you may have in mind. It is, instead, an updated version of the expurgated Bible that an author, critic, and former English professor named Ernest Sutherland Bates published with the same company in 1936. Bates’s version, Lodowick Allison explains in his helpful introduction, was intended “to be read as a book,” and to this end Bates eliminated the enumeration of chapters and verses as well as “the double column format, separated the stories, poems, and songs from the text, introduced quotation marks, and modernized spellings.” Mr. Allison, a former publisher of NR, correctly concludes that “the result is refreshing to the eye accustomed to the dense typography of most editions of the Bible” and points out that many of Bates’s innovations “have now been copied by new translation” that have appeared over the past three decades, For good reason, since with the exception of the elimination of chapter and verse (which makes it impossible to give standard references) these rather mechanical changes are eminently sensible.