The Geneva BibleThe Bible of the Exiles

The Bible English Homes Read Before 1611

The Geneva Bible was the English Bible that families owned and read at home for the two generations before the King James Version. It was translated by English Protestants living in exile in Geneva, printed there in 1560, and brought back to England, where it went through well over a hundred editions before the last one appeared in 1644. Shakespeare's plays echo its wording, the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 carried it with them, and the King James translators kept a great deal of its English when they made their own.

It was made for ordinary readers to study for themselves. It was small enough for a household to buy, printed in clear type, divided into numbered verses, and furnished with maps, tables, summaries and notes in the margin to help with the hard places. Those notes made it the most widely read Bible in English homes, and they were also the part of it that King James I disliked most. The story of the King James Version cannot be told without it.

Exiles in Geneva

When Mary I came to the English throne in 1553, she restored the Roman Catholic faith in England and the laws against heresy. Protestant preachers and writers were imprisoned, and many were burned. A number of English Protestants left the country and settled in the cities of the Continent that would receive them, among them Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Zurich and Geneva.

In Geneva the exiles found a city that welcomed them. John Calvin was its leading pastor, and in 1558 Theodore Beza, a fine scholar of Greek, came there to teach. The English formed their own congregation, which for a time had John Knox among its ministers. Among them was William Whittingham, an Oxford scholar, who set to work on an English New Testament. It was printed in Geneva by Conrad Badius on 10 June 1557, with an epistle by Calvin at its front. Whittingham's text was a revision of William Tyndale's New Testament, checked against the Greek and the newest Latin translation by Beza, and it was set in Roman type and divided into numbered verses.

Mary died in November 1558, and Elizabeth I succeeded her. Most of the exiles went home, but Whittingham and a few others stayed to finish the whole Bible. Anthony Gilby led the work on the Old Testament, and Thomas Sampson and others helped. In the preface of 1560 they wrote that they had been occupied in the work "for the space of two years and more day and night." The English congregation met the cost, the printer Rowland Hall produced it in Geneva in 1560, and the translators dedicated it to the new queen.

The preface says plainly why they had done it. They had judged that there was nothing they could do "more acceptable to God and comfortable to his Church than in the translating of the Holy Scriptures into our native tongue." The earlier English Bibles, they wrote, needed to be "perused and reformed," because more was now known of the Hebrew and Greek. They were building on what had come before, above all the printed work of Tyndale and Coverdale, which followed the handwritten Bible of John Wycliffe's followers by more than a century, and they meant their book to be read in English homes.

A Bible Made for Reading at Home

The English Bibles before 1560 that most people saw were the large volumes chained in parish churches, printed in heavy black-letter type and meant to be read aloud from a lectern. The Geneva Bible was a quarto, a book about the size of a large modern hardback, and it was soon printed in smaller sizes as well. A tradesman or a farmer could buy one, keep it at home and read it to his family.

Everything in it was arranged to help a reader find his way. It was printed in Roman type, the clear lettering still used in books today. It was the first complete English Bible with every chapter divided into numbered verses, and each verse began on a new line, so that a reader could find a place, mark it and return to it. How those numbers came to be printed in Geneva is told in Where Chapter and Verse Numbers Came From. Words that the translators had to add in English to make the sense clear, with nothing to match them in the Hebrew or Greek, were set in a different letter "that it may easily be discerned from the common letter." The King James Version kept this practice, and it is why some words in a King James Bible are printed in italics.

Each book and each chapter opened with a short summary of what it contained. A word or phrase at the top of each page named its chief subject. There were woodcut pictures for passages in the books of Moses, the Kings and Ezekiel, such as the tabernacle and Solomon's temple, where the translators thought a picture would make plain what words could not. There were maps of the lands of the Bible, and two tables at the end, one explaining the meaning of Hebrew names and the other listing the principal subjects of the whole Bible. In the usual names of people and places, the preface says, they changed little "for fear of troubling the simple readers."

The Notes in the Margin

The feature that made the Geneva Bible famous was its notes. The translators said they had gathered "brief annotations upon all the hard places," both to explain obscure words and to show how the text applied to the life of the church. Most of the notes are of the first kind. They give the meaning of a Hebrew phrase, name the place a verse refers to, point to another passage that explains the one in hand, or say in a line what a hard verse means. For a household with no commentary and no teacher at hand, they were a study Bible in one volume.

Some notes went further and pressed the reading of the Reformed churches, on election and on the errors of Rome, and the later editions added more. From 1576 many printings carried Laurence Tomson's revision of the New Testament, and from 1599 a new set of notes on Revelation by Franciscus Junius, and these were sharper in their language about Rome than the first edition had been. A reader today will find much in the notes to be grateful for and some things written in the heat of a hard time.

Two notes in particular troubled King James. The first is on the Hebrew midwives in Egypt, who were ordered by Pharaoh to kill the boys born to Hebrew women and would not do it.

But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.

Exodus 1:17
KJV

When Pharaoh asked the midwives why the boys were alive, they gave him an excuse. The Geneva note on their answer reads: "Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling evil." The note approves their refusal to obey the king and finds fault with the lie they told him. To a king who held that subjects must never resist their prince, a note saying that disobedience to a king could be lawful was dangerous.

The second is on King Asa of Judah, who removed Maachah, his mother (the note adds that she may have been his grandmother), from her place as queen because she had made an idol.

And also concerning Maachah the mother of Asa the king, he removed her from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove: and Asa cut down her idol, and stamped it, and burnt it at the brook Kidron.

2 Chronicles 15:16
KJV

The Geneva note says that in this Asa "lacked zeal," because by the covenant the people had just sworn and by the law of God she should have been put to death, and that he "gave place to foolish pity." James had reason to read that note closely. His own mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to give up her throne in 1567 and was put to death in England in 1587.

Hampton Court and a New Translation

Under Elizabeth the Geneva Bible became the Bible of English homes, but the bishops of the Church of England did not want its notes read aloud in the churches. Archbishop Matthew Parker organised a revision of the Great Bible by a group of bishops, and the Bishops' Bible appeared in 1568. It was read in the churches, while the Geneva went on being read at home. The Geneva New Testament was printed in England for the first time in 1575, and the whole Bible in 1576, and from then on English printers produced it in great numbers.

In January 1604, soon after James came to the English throne, he met with bishops and Puritan ministers at Hampton Court. One of the Puritans, John Rainolds of Oxford, proposed a new translation of the Bible, and the king agreed. William Barlow, who wrote the account of the conference, records the king "professing that he could never yet see a Bible well translated in English, but the worst of all his Majesty thought the Geneva to be."

The king gave a warning with his approval. No marginal notes were to be added to the new translation, because he had found in the Geneva notes some that were "very partial, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits." Barlow names his two examples: the note on the midwives in the first chapter of Exodus, which "alloweth disobedience unto Kings," and the note in Second Chronicles that "taxeth Asa for deposing his mother only, and not killing her." The rules drawn up for the translators followed the king's wish. The new Bible would carry no notes in the margin "but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words," together with references to other passages.

Geneva Words in the King James Version

The translators were told to follow the Bishops' Bible and alter it only as far as the original required. They were also given a list of older translations to use where those agreed better with the Hebrew and Greek, and the Geneva was on that list. In practice they used it constantly, and many familiar phrases in the King James Version came into it from the Geneva rather than from the Bishops' Bible.

The twenty-third psalm shows how this happened. The Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible both made the shepherd psalm say that the psalmist could lack nothing, and the Bishops' Bible began it with "God is my shepherd." The Geneva translators wrote "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," and the King James Version kept their words. In the next verse the Hebrew speaks of waters of rest¹, the word for repose and quiet. The Great Bible had called them "waters of comfort" and the Bishops' Bible "calm waters." The Geneva Bible called them "the still waters," and that is the phrase English readers have known ever since.

A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

Psalms 23:1-2
KJV

Ecclesiastes opens with the Hebrew word for vanity², meaning emptiness, something passing and unsatisfying, which occurs in 64 verses of the Old Testament, 30 of them in Ecclesiastes. The Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible turned the book's first cry into a long phrase about "most vain vanity." The Hebrew sets the singular word beside its plural, and the Geneva Bible gave that short pattern word for word, "Vanity of vanities," and the King James translators took it over. In Isaiah's prophecy of the child who would be born, where the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible spoke of "the giver of counsel," the Geneva Bible gave the names "Wonderful, Counsellor," and the King James Version followed it.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6
KJV

The spelling has been modernised in the table, and the words have not been changed. The last row shows the translators making their own choice. When Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together after their sin, the Hebrew says they made girdles³, a word for a belt or covering worn about the waist. The Geneva translators called them "breeches," and the word gave the book its popular name, the Breeches Bible. The King James Version went back to "aprons," the word of Tyndale and of the English Bibles printed after him.

The new translation did not replace the Geneva at once. Families kept the Bibles they had, and the Geneva went on being printed for more than thirty years. By the middle of the seventeenth century the King James Version had become the Bible of English homes as well as English churches, and it carried with it much of the English the exiles had written in Geneva. The 1599 printing of the Geneva Bible can still be read beside the King James Version, verse by verse, on this site.

A People Reading Scripture for Themselves

The Geneva Bible was made in a time of exile and danger, and its makers had one great aim: that the people of England should have the Scriptures in their own language and be able to understand them. They wrote in their preface that the word of God was "the only food and nourishment of our souls." They asked their readers to receive it "as sent from God to the people of God," to study it and to practise it.

That is what Scripture asks of every household. Moses told Israel to keep God's words in their hearts and to teach them to their children at home, by the way, at night and in the morning. Matthew Henry, writing in the early 1700s, put the same thought simply: "He that loves God loves his Bible." He noted Bishop Patrick's remark that Moses "thought his law so very plain and easy that every father might be able to instruct his sons in it and every mother her daughters." The Shema placed the word of God at the centre of family life.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7
KJV

The Geneva Bible put that command within reach of English families, and they took it up. A father could read a chapter to his household in the evening, find a verse again by its number, and look to the margin when a word was hard. Henry, commenting on the Bereans, said that "those are truly noble" who "make the scriptures their oracle and touchstone, and consult them accordingly." The Bereans did this when they heard Paul preach, and Luke records it to their honour, as told in The Noble Bereans.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

Acts 17:11
KJV

Paul reminded Timothy that he had known the Scriptures from a child, in a home where his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice shared that faith (2 Timothy 1:5). The Geneva Bible made that kind of childhood possible for thousands of English children, and the King James Version that followed it did the same for centuries more.

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 3:15
KJV

The conviction behind all of it was the conviction of the Reformation, that Scripture is the final authority for the church and is given for every believer to read, as told in Reformation Day: Sola Scriptura. The books the exiles translated were the books the church had long received as the word of God, as described in The Canon of Scripture. Kings and translations came and went, and the word they carried did not change.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Isaiah 40:8
KJV