For out of the ground made the Lorde God to grow euery tree pleasant to the sight and good for meate.

(The Geneva Bible: 1560)

And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to behold and pleasant to eat of.

(The Douai Bible: 1609)

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.

(Authorized Version: 1611)

If these are the varying achievements of the masters, what manifold dangers, then, await the ‘simple creature’ who attempts in our own day to re-tell even a fraction of any particular chapter of the Old Testament in his own words.

To read, too, any book worthy of the name needs all the powers of understanding and imagination and spirit of which one is capable, and even then, what is made of the reading may fall far short of what was intended in the writing. How much so, then, when that book is the Bible! Its unique history is proof of it. Even the most usual of words in the most ordinary of circumstances may have many senses. We say, ‘Here I am, at home’: meaning, ‘in my own familiar place’; and, maybe, ‘the house where I was born’. But as when striking a note softly on a piece of fine glass one may listen on to its chiming overtones, so, if we listen to the echoes of the word home in memory, they can hardly fail to remind us of the home that is the body, where the ‘I, myself’, has its earthly dwelling. Next, maybe, of the ‘keeping in order’ of that home. And last, of the home of the heart’s desire, which has had almost as many names given to it as there are races of mankind.

‘Worde,’ as Wycliffe says, ‘worde wynd and mannes mynd is full short, but letter written dwelleth.’ So too with the Bible. Its meanings or ‘understandings’, as St. Thomas Aquinas declared, are fourfold. First the literal, which is ‘ground and foundement’ of the other three—the allegorical, the moral and the analogical.

These words sound a little formidable, but no word is ‘long’, when one knows the meaning of it. Thus the word Jerusalem may mean first, literally, the chief city of Palestine—seated beyond the barren hills between it and the sea, and of an age-long, unique and tragic history. Next, allegorically, it may signify also the Jerusalem that is the longed-for Zion, the place of peace, the Church on earth. Next, morally, it may signify the soul of man. And last, analogically, in what by intention it resembles, it is the place of paradise, ‘where there shall be bliss in body and soul without end’. The Jerusalem of King David, that is; the Jerusalem of Christ, the Messiah; the Jerusalem mourned and desired in every human heart; the heavenly Jerusalem otherwhere. Or again, the literal refers to things that happen or have happened on earth, the allegorical to what is to be believed, the moral to what is to be done, and the analogical to what is to be hoped for in the life to come.

A word in the Old Testament in the inspiration of the man who wrote it, may be taken to bear only one of these interpretations, or more than one, or all. So, too, in differing respects, in other writings. William Blake’s ‘Tiger’, for example; is it to read too much into his poem if we see in it the tiger that ranges the forest of the night, the tiger that is the emblem of strength and ferocity, the tiger that is the exemplar of fearlessness, the tiger that is a revelation of the miracle of divine creativeness? And so, too, maybe, when Shakespeare wrote of ‘what we fear of death’. But here I am venturing beyond my depth.

All this, at least, concerns the stories contained in this volume as they appear, once and for all, in the all-sufficing ‘bare text’ of the Old Testament itself. My own versions of them, apart from what has been literally embodied from it (and even here the frame given to that must in some degree affect its meaning),