Miles Coverdale and the Psalms

An extract from the Choirstalls column in the November parish mag:

"... On Bible Sunday [23 October] we listened to readings from KJV, and to other translations; we heard one of the psalms in Miles Coverdale’s translation that were taken wholesale into the Book of Common Prayer; and a few Sundays ago the whole of Coverdale’s 23^rd Psalm was given on the service sheet for the day. Or so I thought.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and the following day, quite by chance, I came across another reference to Coverdale’s 23^rd Psalm. It seems that quite a bit of editing of Coverdale went on before his psalms reached the Book of Common Prayer, for where BCP has “thy rod and thy staff comfort me”, Coverdale had actually written “thy staffe and thy shepehoke comforte me.” What a compelling word is shepehoke, or sheephook, as we would now spell it, if it hadn’t dropped out of use a few hundred years ago, as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary points out. It is a word whose meaning is graphically as well as orthographically clear.

But what authority did Coverdale have for using it?  He had no Hebrew, and worked mainly from the Latin of the Vulgate, in which rod and staff appear as virga and baculus, both instruments of punishment rather than comfort. I suspect that Coverdale was attempting to impose meaning on a difficult passage by contrasting staff, a defence against any passing ravening wolves, perhaps, with the shepherd’s crook, used to gather strays back into the fold. But in any event, shepehoke didn’t make it into BCP, so we’re left struggling to understand what distinction the original psalmist made between rod and staff. And in the process of revision for BCP a valuable word disappeared from the English language..."

The starting-point for what became a lengthy and still continuing  journey was a Google search for Coverdale + psalms + facsimile. What I am convinced used to be there on the Web isn't there any longer. Instead, all search combinations led eventually to the same website:

http://www.studylight.org/desk/?query=ge+1&t=mcb

The Coverdale Bible is there, transcribed and digitised by some people in the Ukraine: it's riddled with transcription errors that render it virtually useless for purposes of textual comparison, but it was there that I picked up 'shepehoke'.

I'd sent a friend a draft of the article for the parish mag, and unknown to me he joined my quest for a sight of an original Coverdale Psalm 23. He has contacts in the academic libraries of the Benelux countries, and knew that the library of the University of Utrecht had an original, and, as it turned out, an e-book made from the original.

And that's where the snags started to arise. This e-book could easily be transmitted via the library network, but to set up the licensing would cost me over £600.

I have, for the moment, given up, thanked my friend for his goodwill, and asked him not to trouble himself further.

But there are nasty smells lingering. The Ukrainian digitisers claim copyright on their digitisation of Coverdale's work, although copyright is not a word that would have figured in Miles's vocabulary because it hadn't been invented.

I can understand that the libraries in which the treasures of the past are kept don't want any Tom, Dick or Shifty Sid getting their grubby mitts on precious vols and probably nicking a page or two to flog on the dodgy antiquities market, but denying access to originals in the Internet age, when facsimiles can so easily be made, smacks a little of ivory towers. Miles Coverdale wanted his translations of the psalms (let alone the Bible) to be voiced abroad, loudly, in every place where the flock foregather, to educate and illuminate the lives of people who probably couldn't read or write.

It is now far more difficult to see or hear his words as he spoke them and wrote them than it was in his lifetime.

So here is an appeal.

If you have an e-Coverdale, could you send me Psalms 23 and 121 (that's all I need)? Post a comment and I'll set up a short-lived e-mail address.

If you are a biblical scholar and understand ancient Hebrew could you explain the origins of what became virga and baculus in Latin, and then rod and staff in KJV?