Statenvertaling (1637)

A national synod commissioning a Bible translation is one thing. Actually producing it is another, and the gap between the two, in this case, ran to nineteen years. The Synod of Dort voted to commission a new Dutch Bible translated directly from the original Hebrew and Greek in 1618 and 1619, but the States-General did not accept and fund the request until 1626, and only then did real work begin.

Six translators, three assigned to the Old Testament and three to the New, met starting in 1626 at the Leiden house of Johannes Bogerman, who led the effort. Their draft then passed to twenty provincial revisers, two representing each regional synod, who worked toward a text every reviser could agree on rather than a majority vote among disagreements. The Old Testament was finished by 1632, the New Testament by 1634, and after further revision the States-General finally authorized the completed translation for publication in 1637, nineteen years after the Synod of Dort had first called for it. That patience produced a text translated from primary sources rather than from an intermediate language, the same rigor the King James translators were applying to English at almost exactly the same moment.

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.