The Bay Psalm Book of 1640

For Christmas 2009 my wife gave me a copy of the 1903 facsimile edition of the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first book to be published in the English-speaking colonies in the New World. Although I mentioned it briefly in this blog at the time, I did not comment any further on the volume. Given that it is nearly 120 years old, it is in remarkably good condition, although only one side survives of the open-ended box it came in. An introduction to this edition was written by one Wilberforce Eames (1855-1937), a self-taught librarian and scholar known as the "Dean of American Bibliographers."

This collection was used liturgically by the New England Puritans, many of whom had become dissatisfied with the Sternhold & Hopkins Psalter used in England at the time. This is from Eames' introduction:

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, and founded the first permanent colony in New England, they brought with them Henry Ainsworth's version of the Psalms in prose and metre, with the printed tunes. This version was used in the church at Plymouth until 1692. Elsewhere, the Puritan colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, coming over in 1629 and 1630, sang the words and tunes of Sternhold and Hopkins's Psalms, which for many years had been published with the ordinary editions of the English Bible.

The translation by Sternhold and Hopkins, however, was not acceptable to many of the nonconformists. Some of the extremists in England even called it "Hopkins his Jigges" and "Genevah Jiggs." Cotton Mather in his Magnalia sets forth the opinion held of it by the Puritans of the Bay Colony in the following words: — "Tho' they blessed God for the Religious Endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the Meetre usually annex'd at the End of the Bible, yet they beheld in the Translation so many Detractions from, Additions to, and Variations of, not only the Text, but the very Sense of the Psalmist, that it was an Offence unto them."

The desire for a translation which would express more exactly the meaning of the original Hebrew led to the undertaking of a new version, not long after the year 1636 in which "the chief Divines in the Country, took each of them a Portion to be Translated." Just what portions were done by each one of the "thirty pious and learned Ministers" then in New England, or how many others aided in the work, we have no means to determine. It is related by John Josselyn, that when he visited Boston on July 11th, 1638, he delivered to Mr. Cotton the Teacher of Boston church, "from Mr. Francis Quarles the poet, the Translation of the 16, 25, 51, 88, 113, and 137. Psalms into English Meeter, for his approbation.". . .

The principal part of the work, we are told, was committed to Mr. Richard Mather, minister of the church in Dorchester, who probably wrote the preface also, and to Mr. Thomas Welde and Mr. John Eliot, associate minister of the church in Roxbury.

The Bay Psalm Book may be more faithful to the Hebrew than the Sternhold & Hopkins, but if so, this was bought largely at the expense of proper syntax and pleasing verse. An example from Psalm 72 will suffice to illustrate this:

Poore of the people he shall judge,
and children of the needy save;
& he in peeces shall break downe
each one that them oppressed have.

This is not George Herbert or John Milton! Shakespeare had mercifully passed to his reward before he could be subjected to this. Of the Bay Psalm Book Henry Alexander Glass observed that “[q]uotations from it have afforded amusement to almost all writers on metrical psalmody.” It is little wonder that none of these texts survived past the early years of the Puritan commonwealths in New England.

One wonders why the authors of these 16th- and 17th-century psalters were so bent on making everything rhyme when doing so produced virtually unsingable—and even unspeakable—texts. This is a major reason why, in my own Genevan Psalter and Niagara Psalter projects, I have departed from rhyme when it seemed proper to do so, both for literary reasons and for better communicating the meaning of the original. Nevertheless, despite its obvious flaws, the Bay Psalm Book remains a significant monument to the Puritans' faithfulness in singing the biblical Psalms in their liturgies.