A good — imaginative — story is akin to retrospective poetry. It is about life as it is, as well as how we can restore it. In the seventeenth century, the Bible was the center of emotional and intellectual life. Tyndell's majestic prose, the Geneva and Permitted versions have transformed the way the English think, and the English language—not just the way of thinking about theology. Reading the Song of Songs led us to millenarianism as well as to the desert. The related symbols of the desert, garden, and enclosure were related to the rise of Congregational churches, as well as to agriculture. And all this together led beyond the Atlantic Ocean, where anti-Catholicism also captured us. Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob help us understand the theological debates about predestination and free will; but they also talk about the economic problems of the younger sons and clarify the political ideas of the Levellers and Diggers, the memory of which remains with us until the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Millennium did not manage to come to earth; but revolutionary millenarianism tells us a lot about the need for social reform, and secularized millenarianism helped Britain become a world empire. The biblical concept of idolatry was used for political purposes against Charles I; in the end, the Bible itself was condemned as an idol. The Psalms raised questions about politics and literary genres, as well as theology. They led us to Milton, just as the garden leads us to Marvel and metaphysical poetry. The Bible connects Hackwill with Samuel Fisher and Spinoza, and the Battle of the Books with the Battle of the Book.

Men and women used biblical idioms and biblical stories to discuss religious, political, moral, and social issues that might be dangerous to touch directly. The concept of the chosen people helped to express the extreme nationalism of England, and also gave Gerard Winstanley and the diggers confidence that their communist colonies were implementing the truth of biblical prophecy; This eventually helped to establish sectarianism as a permanent feature of English society. The idea that God was abandoning His chosen Englishmen led some to emigrate to America, others to fight for a more righteous society at home, and a society to become more aware of international obligations.

If we want to understand the mentality in seventeenth-century England, we can follow Jack Fisher's recommendation to start with the Bible. The Bible in English has helped men and women to think about their society, to be critical of its institutions, and to question some of its values. It had an authority that no other book could achieve: kings and their opponents turned to the Bible in the great conflicts of the revolutionary decades. At least one commentator has pointed out that the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the regicide John Bradshaw, and the Whig Republican Algernon Sidney all quoted the same biblical texts in support of their very different political positions.

Those who founded Congregational churches were often younger brothers and sisters who knew what land hunger and social oppression were. Banian speaks of the temptation to sell his birthright in Christ, as Esau did; he recalled the Jewish jubilee with approval: "The land must not be sold forever; for my land, said God" (Lev. 25:23)[1975]. So the sale of land, to which Banian's ancestors had been led by poverty, affected his state of mind. The land issue was still unresolved when Spence's followers put forward the idea of a jubilee. The wrath of God, from which some nonconformists decided to flee, was expressed in the injustice of English society. The millennium, the rule of the saints, and the promised land were the names they gave to their hopes for a better society, whether in New England or in Old England. In addition to threats of retribution, the Bible gives hope: prophets for a return from exile, for the good coming of the Good News, for Revelation. The end of all three of Milton's last poems offered hope, after and through defeat, in matters greater than his personal life. Idolatry was a word that Milton and Toroujon used to refer to false values.

When we rightly assert that the English became the people of the Book, we must not think that theology or life after death was all they studied in this Book. In fact, the Old Testament says nothing about life after death (1976). They found lessons and comfort for life on earth as well as for the journey to heaven. Some Englishmen also found confirmation and justification for their worst vices - discrimination against women, patriarchy, racism, social hierarchy, national enmity. The pious have not monopolized biblical phraseology either. At the end of the 18th century, folk songs praised the biblical virtues of highway robbers[1977]. The Bible established cultural norms that survived religious faith.

In this book, I have said nothing about the Bible in Wales, although it has had a lasting influence on the cultural history of that country. The Epistles and Gospels were translated in 1551, the entire New Testament in 1567, and the entire Bible translated into Welsh in 1588. But it is beyond the scope of this book and is not in my power. Protestant English Bible was unique in many respects. But in the junta and the XIX centuries, it began to be exported. Professor Valentin Boss has convincingly argued that Milton's Paradise Lost was a bestseller in pre-revolutionary Russia before the Bible became available in the native language. He had a great influence as a substitute for the Bible [1978]. In China, the missionaries had with them the great Biblical allegory of Banian, translated into Chinese. And when the Taiping rebels roused millions of peasants in the mid-nineteenth century, coming closer to overthrowing the emperor than any other movement until 1948, the Bible and The Pilgrim's Paths were their leader's favorite books [1979].

II

This book deals almost exclusively with the Old Testament, almost without touching on Revelation and the New Testament. When I first started thinking about the topic, it was not my intention, but the way was indicated by the material itself. The Old Testament describes a journey to the promised land. Oliver Cromwell, I believe, is the last English politician to be hailed as Moses. This happened immediately after he dispersed the "rump" of the Long Parliament. George Fox was perhaps the last religious leader to be likened to Moses. But old England did not turn into Israel; New England was not a country where milk and honey flowed, but a useful market for manufactured goods and the slave trade. Edwards, enumerating the mistakes of the sectarians, named among them the fact that the Old Testament "does not interest and does not oblige Christians who live according to the New Testament to anything." The memory of Babylon and the fear of the Antichrist faded into the background when the Navigation Act and the new imperial policy gave the English a different wealth and greater self-confidence. The favorite texts of the "people of freedom" were taken almost exclusively from the New Testament[1981].

The great Protestant doctrine of predestination attempted to adapt the message contained in the Old Testament to the world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers begins with the Old Testament concept of the priesthood, which is not always easy to find in the New Testament. The ideas of the right of primogeniture and the right of inheritance go back to the patriarchal society of the Old Testament. Monarchy was a problem for the children of Israel, as it was for the people of the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was not a problem for those who lived according to the New Testament, having been hopelessly subjugated by the Roman Empire. The Old Testament virtues were not subtle, they were the "heroic" military virtues that Samuel Butler rejected when Gudibras tried to prove the orthodoxy of his doctrine by apostolic blows and knocks—but they were certainly not apostolic, but rather prophetic. Milton denied "chivalrous" military prowess; he drew his strength of spirit mainly from the Old Testament, but perhaps this virtue is more characteristic of the New Testament. But Milton is the last great creator of the biblical epic; the age of Augustus lost interest in the tribal society of ancient Israel. At the end of the seventeenth century, the cultural self-confidence of England and English literature had already been established. Defoe, whose ideas mark the highest rise of anti-papism, helped to create a new bourgeois novel in which England led the world.

In the end, I think that the Bible in English has done much more good than harm; We should be thankful that critics have worked on her, undermining her supernatural authority and dethroned her at the end of her period of absolute authority. Someone has said that "the world that the Bible created has thrown the Bible off its pedestal." The radical righteous' desire to understand the Bible led them to a critical activity that eventually toppled it from its pedestal. Let us pay tribute to the learned works of Tyndell, Thomas James, William Crashaw, Perkins, Preston, and Chillingworth, as well as to lesser luminaries such as Greenhill and Barrows; the great Milton and Owen, the radicals Walvin, Winstanley, Reiter and Fisher. They overturned their present into the Bible, as Hobbes overturned it into its natural state. They found guidance in the Bible as they diligently sought to understand the relationship of the barbaric stories in the books of Judges, Kings, and Chronicles to their own more complex society. The actual achievements of their vast interpretive volumes may seem inconsistent with the effort put into them; But the influence of their scholarship on the authority of their sermons and books should not be underestimated. To a certain extent, the fact that England eventually became a democratic country owes much to the discussions unleashed by these scholars, discussions which, ironically, eventually led people to rely more on their own reason than on quotations from the sacred text. They cut down the very branch on which they were sitting, giving access to the light, and this benefited those who followed them.

Notes

1