A Bible That Shaped a Language, Not Only a Church

A translation commissioned for one church's pulpits does not usually end up shaping how an entire nation writes. The Statenvertaling did both. Within the Dutch Reformed Church it became, immediately and for centuries afterward, the standard authoritative Bible text, the version its liturgy quoted, its catechesis taught from, and its members simply called the Bible without further qualification.

Its reach extended well past church walls. Linguists studying the history of written Dutch credit the Statenvertaling with substantially shaping and standardizing the modern language, in much the same way the King James Version, translated by English scholars working from largely the same underlying source manuscripts at nearly the same historical moment, shaped modern English. Phrases and cadences first fixed in the 1637 translation worked their way into ordinary written Dutch far beyond any specifically religious context, the way a single influential text can quietly set a language's standard register for generations of writers who never think of themselves as quoting scripture at all. A translation project that took nineteen years to finish ended up outlasting, by centuries, the immediate liturgical need that had justified starting it.