The Making of the King James Bible

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On today's episode of Timeless Wisdom, I am always on the search.

I have about 10 different translations of the Bible in English, and, and I, I gotta tell you, there are some that are somewhat more accurate at times, and I'm going to talk to you about that, but nothing approaches the King James Version for the sense of majesty that the original does have. And so I am terribly interested in this, how it came about.

That's coming up on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to dennisprager.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to The Dennis Prager Show, and I have been looking forward to this interview for some time now. A book has just been published titled God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Nothing has shaped Western thought as much as the Bible. Nothing. I mean, even an atheist has to acknowledge that. So let's get that straight. And no translation has shaped the Western world like the King James translation. Now, I, I got to tell you, and I have to tell the author of the book, Adam Nicholson, first of all, Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

You're in Sussex, England right now, correct?

I am.

Oh, so you put your day in already, so it's, uh, you're nice and relaxed. I trust you're smoking a pipe and there is a, uh, a bulldog at your side.

Feet up by the fire.

Yes, exactly.

That's a whiskey in hand.

That's it, good. The images, the image is perfect with a, with a picture of Winston Churchill right behind you. All right, now I know exactly where you are. For all I know, he's in a pub with, you know, 3 women next to him. Who knows? Anyway, thank you for joining me. Your book is, as I said earlier, God's Secretaries, just published by, in fact, our mutual publisher HarperCollins. Now, by the way, let me just tell you, may I call you Adam?

Of course you can.

No, no, no, if you prefer Mr. Nicholson, I'm happy with that.

No, I prefer Adam.

Okay, very good. Adam, I'm sure you've been interviewed by many, and I hope you have, because this book deserves wide wide distribution. But I bet that I'm one of the few radio talk show hosts or television commentators that have interviewed you who actually knows Biblical Hebrew. So I come to this—

I think you're the only one.

Okay.

You're probably the only one in the world, aren't you? Do I call you Mr. Prager?

Now I've earned Mr. as a result of that.

I think so. I think it's Mr. from now on. You're way, way, way ahead of me on that.

That would be the first time though where the interviewer interviewer calls the guest by his first name and the interviewer gets called by his surname. Now you please—

Well, what can you teach me, Mr. Prager?

You're a good man.

All right.

Anyway, no, no, please, please call me Dennis. In any event, so I come to this with tremendous interest, obviously, and I have— I am always on the search. I have about 10 different translations of the Bible in English, and I got to tell you, there are some that are somewhat more accurate at times, and I'm going to talk to you about that. But nothing approaches the King James Version for the sense of majesty that the original does have. And so I am terribly interested in this, how it came about. So let's, let's— first of all, I always like to ask authors, why did you write this?

Well, I came to it, uh, from a very odd route. A couple of years ago, well, in fact, in 1999, I was writing a book for the British government about a disastrous project they had called the Millennium Dome. I don't know if word of Millennium Dome reached you over there?

Well, it didn't reach me personally. I can't speak for all my listeners.

A huge, vastly expensive, costing £1 billion, uh, you know, $1.5 billion, right, project to make this kind of grand celebration of, uh, the British national spirit. All the threads of British life were meant to be unified in this great circus tent in Greenwich in East London.— and I was employed by the government to, well, not to beat about the bush, to propagandize for it, to write an account of it as the most marvelous thing that ever happened. It was in the end a complete disaster, full of terrible, bitter arguments and kind of a popular failure, terribly criticized in the press, and generally a disaster. And when I was doing it, a friend of mine said, Of course, the thing you should be writing about is the King James Bible, because the King James Bible in the early 17th century was also a great central government project, aim— aiming to unify all the different threads in the nation at the time, bringing together vast numbers of very diverse people. And out of that, out of those same circumstances which have made this modern disaster the most beautiful book ever written in the English language emerged, and how did that happen? I think that that is the question at the heart of my book.

Well, that's a fascinating beginning. It, like so many things that happen in our lives, it happened from, from out of nowhere, as it were. Yeah, it's the last thing you expected, obviously. Then, you know, it is remarkable when going through your book that I never ever expected a committee to ever produce anything good.

No, that is the great curiosity.

They—

the, the king and his archbishop gathered together these 50-odd, uh, divines, academics, bishops, people who wanted to be and would be bishops, court politicians, scholars, experts in Hebrew, many misters among them, and, uh, from that very, very, and deliberately diverse group, this great Jacobean music emerged. And I think the reason that, or one of the reasons that from a committee, uh, something great could emerge in the 17th century is that there was a sense of authority alive in Jacobean England, which we don't quite have. They believed in, uh, authority to a degree that I think we would now find extraordinary and very deeply illiberal. You know, Jacobean England is a place where people can get executed for not agreeing with central government ideology. I mean, in a way, it is an authoritarian state, like a 20th century authoritarian system. And I think that if it had been a modern committee, there would have been far, far more disagreement than there was then, simply because you had to obey. There is one central state ideology, and you have to obey it if you're to get on in the world, and at the edges, if you're even to survive.

And therefore what?

There—

because there was authority Therefore, the committee, what, would listen to one voice? Yes, I mean, whose voice was that? King James I?

Yes, the— I think, yeah, the 17th century idea of authority is that unless you have a very, very, uh, well-established and, uh, unchallengeable authority and order, you risk anarchy.— there is no idea that individuals should have freedom of conscience, or freedom really to think or do what they want. The governing idea of the time is this very, very conservative one, that you have to subscribe to a steeply hierarchical structure which begins at the bottom obviously with peasants and labourers, and rises up through the ranks of society through the court and these people who are actually involved in this translation onto the king and onto God. And this is one continuous, integrated, organic whole. And if you, if you start to eat away at that, as of course Puritanism does, you know, Puritanism essentially says there is no need for this hierarchy, uh, any individual can just have direct access to God. You don't need bishops, archbishops. Maybe you don't even need kings. And those people, those kind of what we would think of now as sort of free-thinking Puritans, were seen as the most terrifyingly dangerous people in English society. By the way, of course, England booted them out, right?

And we got them.

And you got—

and we got— and that's right, and we got the United States as a result. Now, now, it's interesting though, because In modern liberal— and I don't use that word politically, I'm using it in your term, liberal, illiberal— in modern liberal parlance, Puritan is almost synonymous with arch-conservative and hierarchical and authoritarian.

That is interesting, uh, an interesting shift, isn't it? Because at the heart of Puritanism, and in fact I think you could say even at the heart of Christianity, there is this very subversive message, uh, which dispenses with worldly authority and, and makes worldly authority insignificant in, in, in the eyes of God, even in the eyes— certainly, you know, in the light of a direct connection between the individual conscience and God. So American authority is an irrelevance.

American, American individualism and liberty, then, owes a great deal to the Puritans.

It certainly does. I mean, I think that we, all of us, completely misinterpret Puritanism. I mean, there is an idea that Puritanism, for example, in the 17th century, is against sex and against fleshly pleasures. But, but these people are very, very involved with the idea that sex within marriage is a beautiful and creative thing. They write and translate, for example, the Song of Songs, which is a highly erotic poem translated by some of the most Puritan translators involved on this, uh, in the lushest and most exotic way you could think of.

We'll be back in a moment. Adam Nicholson, and you can imagine if he's this well-spoken how well his book reads, God's Secretaries. We'll be back in a moment. I'm Dennis Prager. Dennis Prager.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

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Now back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.

Hi everybody, my guest in England is Adam Nicholson, who has just published through HarperCollins here in the United States, The Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. And even if, uh, you are not religiously inclined, it is a fascinating read because I can't think of a book that has come close to influencing our society as much as the Bible and as much as the King James Version. Now, this is done by, by order of King James I in the early 1600s, right?

Yeah.

Now, why did he— what was wrong with pre-existing English translations?

Well, England had got in a terrible muddle. He didn't really know whether it was a Protestant Reformed country or, um, a sort of hangover from, from a Catholic past. And England, they yo-yoed all through the 16th century one way and another, sort of, and it ended up with a very Protestant, uh, theology, uh, and a very Catholic, uh, form of church organization and way of going about things in church. And it ended up with two Bibles, one the sort of popular Bible which was very Calvinist and, uh, very well done. I mean, a beautiful translation but very anti-king.

Well, how do you, how do you have either a translation as a translation or it's not?

How do you have, for example, the, uh, this, this Bible called the Geneva Bible, it had been done by some Englishmen exiled in Geneva, uh, always translates the word king in the Old Testament, which appears more than 400 times, as tyrant.

No kidding. That's like, that is the first political correctness.

This was the great Bible of 16th century England. It was Shakespeare's Bible, which is, you know, we were talking about subversion before. It's one of the most subversive books ever written, basically saying that kings don't mean anything in the light of God. And so the government, the Elizabethan government, had produced another Bible to rival it called the Bishop's Bible, which was very kind of proper in supporting the church establishment, had a huge portrait of Elizabeth on its title page, no picture of God. And, but it was a dreadful translation.

It—

the phrase that appears in the King James Bible as 'cast thy bread upon the waters,' for example, is translated in the Bishop's Bible as 'lay thy bread upon wet faces,' and that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. So, so something had to be done. James, you know, he couldn't tolerate the anti-King Bible, and no one in the country could tolerate the hopeless, uh, Government Bible. So this was a project to make a Bible, which is an unbelievably central thing to do. You know, it's like the kind of code for everything you might do or think or any way you might live. So the Bible is central to government, and he has— he commissions a Bible which everyone can subscribe to but doesn't undermine his own standing as king.

Oh, so that is— so That's how it came about. This was a way to, as you pointed out originally, to unify the contrasting, as it were, Catholicized English with the newly Protestantized English.

That is the idea, that in some ways it bridges these very, very opposite categories.

And it bridges it through the means of majesty and accuracy, is that it?

Yeah, I mean, I think that this is— it's a very, it's a very conscious program to make a Bible that will suit everyone, and it's a question of rhetoric really, of style, of the way it goes about it. And the Bible over and over again makes, uh, makes a translation which is very clear and accessible. Using very ordinary language. I think there are only something like 10,000 words used in the King James Bible, as against some 25,000 Shakespeare, for example. So it's very ordinary language, though to us it's extremely flowery language. To us today, set in this very majestic and very sonorous tone.

Was it so— was it sonorous to the Englishmen of that day?

Yeah, it is not— not only to us, it's not the English that was spoken on the street at the time. It's the— in the sort of English which these translators imagined God might speak, right? It is sort of godly English.

Which brings me to this question: were all the members of these committees that made the translation, were they all believers?

Undoubtedly. I mean, there were atheists in early modern England, but there were very, very few. And every single one of these translators would have— would almost have not understood the question. You know, it's like saying to us, do you believe in physics?

Right.

It's how the world works.

Yes, yes. And I have to say, it's reflected in the translation. They— you feel that they— there's trepidation before the Holy of Holies when you read the King James Version.

You do. I mean, I think that, uh, it's difficult in some ways for us, particularly I think in England, perhaps more in England than in America, to realize the— how central this is to, to the way in which that world works. It's— it is much more like I think, uh, I mean, the place of the Bible is much more like the place of the Quran in an Islamic country now than the place of the Bible in a modern secular democracy. It is the, it is the sort of DNA of the culture. And so these people are addressing the, the central document, and the immense care they took to be loyal to the original text is really— it's an awe-inspiring sight. I mean, the, the precision with which they, um, need to transmit those original meanings is an extraordinary and humbling thing.

One of the members of the committee, if I remember correctly, actually spoke about a dozen languages. Is that right?

Yeah, the— what the great— the greatest of all the translators, a man called Lancelot Andrews is said to have spoken 15 modern languages and 6 ancient.

I mean, it's, it's, it boggles the mind.

It boggles the mind. But I mean, Andrews is a very good example of, of how different they are from us. This great scholar who is Bishop of Ely and Winchester and Chichester, one great big sort of administrative job after another, a court politician, a member of the King's Council, like the King's Cabinet, you know, central politician, uh, one of the great prose writers of his day, as well as being this great scholar, making himself a fortune on the side, siphoning off money from the, from the bishoprics that he held, um, throwing parties for the king which cost £3,000 at a time when, when a vicar would be paid £20 a year in salary. He is a sort of multiple, multiple figure.

Larger than life, as we say.

He simply doesn't exist today, apart from you, of course, Mr. Prager.

You're quite charming. Adam Nicholson, Adam Nicholson, I have to meet you one day. Adam Nicholson, God's Secretaries is the book, The Making of the King James Bible, and I can't recommend it too highly to you. We'll be back in a moment. I want to ask about the word thou. We shall return. This is the Dennis Prager Show.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

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Now back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.

I'm Dennis Prager and I welcome you back. I am talking to Adam Nicholson. He's in England, I'm in California.

USA.

His book is God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. And in case you're curious, to say that you don't have to be religious to enjoy this book, I guess I could best put it in this way: there was a large article on the book in The New Yorker, which is as resolutely modern and secular as any magazine can be, and this is how they described the book. It is a popular book as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt, and jauntily unfootnoted, alas. I'm sure you've seen that, and it was in fact— their review was reviewed quite widely. By the way, I'm going to put my own credibility on the line with you. I, I You check on Amazon.com in America, our version of it, and I bet you, you will see it rise fairly significantly after my listeners hear you. I have a book reading and book buying audience that I'm very proud of, and your book should be on their list. So you watch that number. You'll get some satisfaction, I believe. Of course, if it goes down, don't tell me. In any event, the, uh, I want to ask you, because I've always wondered about this, because by the way, let me just tell you, when I teach the Bible, which I have been doing for 20 years from the Hebrew, and when I, when I, but I do it in English, and, and I use a number of translations. I love the King James by far the most in terms of sheer absolute accuracy. They've done a little better in modern, for example It really doesn't say thou shalt not steal. It says do not steal. But thou shalt not steal is far more powerful— thou shalt and thou shalt not— than do not. But in terms of sheer accuracy, the Hebrew is lo tignov, do not, no steal, period. And so that's why it's good to use use both. So it always interested me why they did say thou shalt not steal.

Well, thou shalt not steal is about you, isn't it? It's about you, the reader or the listener.

Which is true, and the Hebrew is the singular. And do not—

that's a good point, because it's a statement from, you know, the divine throne in a way. But thou shalt not steal has got a kind of personal—

Oh, I agree. I much prefer it. I'm saying, but, and you know what, now that you mention it, the implication in the Hebrew is you because of the verb. We don't have that in English. Do not steal could be you plural or you singular, right? But in— you're right, because it is in the Hebrew the singular of the second person of you. So that's—

I—

you, you've just actually made a great defense of the thou shalt not. Let me ask you about thou. What was that? When— if I met you on a street in England in 1603, would I have said, 'How art thou feeling?' Uh, you might have and you might not have.

It was just on the cusp. That was, that was one of the things that was changing. English was in an incredibly fluid state, and thou, uh, did have an element of antiqueness about it even then. But even then, but it wasn't, uh, uncurrent. It was just on the change. And I think you can see that throughout the King James Bible, that where they have the choice, they on the whole choose the older form, the sort of form which interestingly their fathers and grandfathers might have used.

Was thou— what was thou? Was there Did thou exist along with you?

Yes, I mean thou is the oldest form and for the second person singular of what we now say is you, and it just dropped away in the course of the 17th century, that by the 18th century it would have been thought very curious to use thou. But it's, I mean I think thou is a great word because it is in fact a word of intimacy. Isn't it? It's not a— it's not you plural, you the crowd. There is a kind of, you know, closeness between—

Oh, that's right. In other words, you can be singular or plural, but thou is only singular.

And there is a certain distance in you. You all, it almost says.

That's right, that's right. Oh, this is just exhilarating for me. We'll be back in a moment. Adam Nicholson, N-I-C-O, not C-H, N-I-C-O-L-S-O-N, HarperCollins, the publisher of the book God about secretaries. We return in a moment, and we're going to learn a little about King James, who, by the way, isn't it ironic that that's, that's basically all he's remembered for? And what a remembrance it is. We'll be back in a moment. I'm Dennis Prager.

Dennis, I just wanted to call and say I'm trying not to get too emotional because you have changed my life. I have read your books. I listen to your Timeless Wisdom Show. Every day, and I want to be like you when I grow up. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for being a true person for God and showing the light in God, in you, in this world, because this world needs it. I can't say thank you so much, uh, enough. My name is Tina. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I am praying for a full recovery. Continue to fight it. You're doing awesome. Thank you again. Goodbye.

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I'm Dennis Prager, and I welcome you back. My guest in Sussex, England is Adam Nicholson. He is the author of the just-published God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, and as the New Yorker Hardly a religious tome or religious journal notes, uh, it is elegant, erudite, passionate, popular, and jauntily unfootnoted. But that part I put in undertones. I don't know what footnotes— I don't even know what footnotes, frankly, you can use much. It was, uh, I, I'm—

it's—

I actually do like when there are footnotes in history books, but I'm not sure that this one really needed it.

Well, it was a difficult decision to make about footnotes. I mean, footnotes do sort of lend an air of trust to the thing.

Yes, that's right.

You see them, you know that you can go back to some sources. But they do have a way of making it look like a sort of reference book, I think, rather than a story. And I wanted to tell a story, right?

Which you do well. Now let's go to King James himself. So we— you really helped me on the thou. I can't tell you, really, this was for— because I have struggled with that so long. Which do I use, the majestic or the accurate? But There is accuracy in "Thou shalt not steal" because it is directed to the "you" singular, and I very much appreciate that. By the way, there is an issue that I have raised with my listeners for much of my 20 years on radio, and that is that "Thou shalt not kill" is actually, in modern English at any rate, inaccurate. It's "Thou shalt not murder," and that is an important distinction. Because thou shalt not kill would mean that the Ten Commandments came out against warfare, came out for pacifism, even vegetarianism theoretically, because you can't kill an animal.

Did kill—

and you may not have the answer to this— did kill in those days imply murder?

I don't know. I mean, certainly they had no compunction about killing, you know. They, they, they— I think I think something like 70 death sentences a year were carried out in, uh, early 17th century England, and they killed happily enough. Uh, I don't know. I think that kill and murder— there is certainly the word murder, uh, is used at the time, and I think they are distinct.

So if it was used at the time, then it was an unfortunate choice for a great translation. I mean, no translation could be perfect, but it really was You're right, I don't have the answer to that.

I don't know why it doesn't say thou shalt not murder.

Because the Hebrew makes this very clear distinction, uh, that they're both, both words there. Anyway, it's just one of those things that has always stuck with me because I know it has misled a lot of well-intentioned religious people into pacifism, opposition to capital punishment, and so on, which may be fine for other reasons but not for the reason that the Ten Commandments bans it. James I, tell us a little about him. Was this an intellectual king?

He was an incredibly intellectual king, the most intellectual person ever to have sat on the English throne. He's the only one ever to have had his works collected in a handsome volume. He was a very, very strange man. He'd, uh, he'd been brought up in Scotland. His mother was Mary, Queen of Scots, and she deserted him, ran away to England when, uh, he was 1 year old. And he'd had a childhood and an adolescence being kidnapped by faction after another of Scottish nobles, rather violent Scottish nobles, uh, being berated and kicked from one end of Scotland to another by some fearsome ministers of the Scottish church. And he became a very odd man, that he was very intellectual. In some ways, intellectuality was a sort of retreat for him from the real world, from the pain of hunting. He loved young boys. Strings of beautiful young boys feature in his life. And, uh, and yet, I mean, he's always had a pretty bad press in history as this self-indulgent, gay, uh, incompetent king. But there is a great, great deal to him. He, he had a vision of a kind of integrated society of one whole loving kingdom, in effect, peace, at peace with itself, which is a great and dignified dream and was then. And this Bible, part of the, part of the purpose of this Bible was to bring about that dream of unity and wholeness.. And people forget that the rest of Europe at the time was riven by these terrible religious wars in France and Germany and all through Central Europe, some of the bloodiest wars ever fought. And James's policy of, you know, non-confrontation between divergent parts of the society actually prevented war happening in England until the 1630s. Well, by when he was dead and his far less competent son Charles was on the throne. So in a way, I can think— you can think of James as rather a hero for that, a kind of a king who believed in love.

Well, obviously he did, since you mentioned the string of boys.

Well, he did. He was all— I mean, he was incredibly self-indulgent. He used to— there's a great story of, uh, he was sitting in court one day when A member of the exchequer walked past with a tray laden with gold coins, £3,000 or £4,000 worth of gold coins, and a beautiful boy was staring at this pile of money open-mouthed. And the king said, "Why are you staring at that?" And he said, "Because I've never seen anything like it in my life." And the king said, "Well, have it then. Why don't you have it? Take it to his rooms." And I think that's just heroic. That's what kings are for.

Well, you know, by the way, this is a very fascinating irony of history, because the argument is made frequently, and I have debated this with myself and with my listeners for many years, how important is the private life of public figures? And I have argued that the private life of public figures is less important than most people that I tend to agree with on other matters. And here is a classic example, because the most religious Americans and others who are English speakers quote and revere properly the Bible that they call the King James Version, with a— for— with regard to a man whose private life was quite in violation of many of the precepts that they most, uh, dearly hold.

Yes, I mean, I think the two things are connected in James, that his, uh, you know, his desire for a happy world in some way comes from his delight in life and having great and pleasurable times.

Fascinating.

The two don't diverge.

Wow, wow. All right, we'll be back in a moment for the final, uh, final installment here of my talk with Adam Nicholson. The book, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.

This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

Precious metals dealers come and go. This is Nick Grovich, president of Ampfed Coin and Bullion. We've stood the test of time since 1983. With the flurry of coin and bullion dealers coming and going, how do you know who to trust and what to buy? At Ampfed Coin and Bullion, we value educated consumers. We want to alert you to good bullion buys in the market and help you steer clear of the tricks and bad deals. Call Ampfed Coin and Bullion for a free coin performance review. 800-221-7694 or AmericanFederal.com.

Now back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.

I'm Dennis Prager. If you want a good read, it is God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicholson is the author. And let me tell you something, sir, if you publish a book on the development of the phone book I am going to have you on next time. I don't care what you write on.

You're a charming man.

You're, you're a charming man. This is it. This has been an absolute delight. Let me ask you, did the— when it came out, the, the King James Version, did it make a big splash immediately?

Incredibly. That is one of the extraordinary things about it. It absolutely sank like a stone. Um, everybody loved the, the older Bible that they'd had. The Geneva Bible. And this thing, uh, just didn't go at all. I mean, everything was done to sort of make it, uh, the great Bible of England, and the English didn't take it up. And so certainly, of course, the, the Pilgrim Fathers didn't take it up.

They went with the Geneva Bible to America because that's the one that said parent instead of king.

It said tyrant instead of king, and it had a lot of, of sort of tips and hints on how to interpret the word of God in, in a very Calvinist way.

So when did it, when did it catch on?

Well, it doesn't— the King James Bible doesn't really take off until after the end of the English Civil War, when finally the monarchy is restored in 1660. Then, almost as a kind of symbol of old England, of the England which had existed before the terrible disruption of the Civil War,— you know, which had killed huge numbers of people, the most, the most damaging war in terms of the proportion of the population killed the English have ever fought. I mean, a terrible, terrible time. And England took up the King James Bible in a way, I think, as a, a memory of something that persisted in England across that terrible rupture. And it was then that the King James Bible became, in a way, the sort of text for the nation.

So the Bible— the Bible that the Puritans who came over here to the colonies, as you may still refer to us, uh, they, they did not bring the King James Bible?

No, they did not. They brought the, the Geneva Bible with them.

And I wonder, I wonder when the King James caught on here then.

Well, that is a long and complicated story, but it is also to do with this, this idea of nation-building. The Geneva Bible, which is about the individual relationship to God of the individual believer, is not a Bible on which you can make a community. It's about, you know, very intense individualism.

That's right.

The King James Bible is about nation-building.

How fascinating.

Being in this together.

Adam Nicholson, you keep writing and I'll keep talking to you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. It's been a joy. God's Secretaries. Thank you. I appreciate it. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Don't go away. You're listening to The Dennis Prager Show.

Tomorrow on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager: sober fun.

That's today's topic. Sober Fun. A lot came together in talking to Julie about this notion of sober fun. It actually arose in a very small way. She was at my house with my wife and me, and she came over to my desk to see what I was looking at on the, on the internet. It was, for whatever reason, it was apparent I wasn't working. As I say to you, I take a vacation every day. So she comes over to the computer. You'll get a charge out of this. What do you think I was looking at?

Stereo something.

Very, absolutely a coherent response. Something audio equipment. I was looking— I'm almost embarrassed to say— I was looking at different inks. I told you folks, I'm really into fountain pens. And the, the variety of colors that were available with a certain brand, and many brands She— so she came over and she looks and sees on the screen all these colors of fountain pen inks. And to my great joy and amazement, she found it fascinating. Just fascinating. And that's what hit her.

She said, "You, Dennis, you have a lot of sober fun." Join us tomorrow to hear more on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles. We want to take just a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the podcast. Go to lifeaudio.com to find dozens of other Faith Center podcasts and their network, including shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.

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