The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New

The University of Pennsylvania's copy of the first edition of the King James Bible, printed in London by Robert Barker in 1611. Penn's own catalogue record identifies it explicitly as a copy of the 'Great HE edition', meaning it carries the uncorrected reading at Ruth 3:15, 'and he went into the citie', that distinguishes the first state of the first printing from the corrected 'she' reading found in the later, separately reset edition usually called the She Bible.

The book has been in Pennsylvania's keeping since 1946, when the accountant and collector T. Edward Ross gave his Bible collection to the university library in memory of Lucien Bonaparte Carpenter. Where the book was for the roughly three and a third centuries before that gift is not recorded in any source consulted for this record.

The He Bible and She Bible are not simply two printings of one edition corrected on the press. Herbert's standard bibliography treats the She Bible as a distinct second edition, dated 1613 on its general title page even though it carries a reused 1611 New Testament title page, and scholars including A.W. Pollard and David Norton have argued that calling them a matched 'pair' misstates the relationship: the She Bible derives from the He Bible, not the reverse. A minority view, associated with F.H.A. Scrivener, has argued the opposite order. Penn's own catalogue record settles only which state its own copy is: this is a He Bible.

What it is

A single folio volume containing the complete Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha in the newly commissioned English translation authorized by King James I, printed on paper in black letter (gothic) type, set in two columns per page, with an engraved architectural title page. Penn's catalogue record gives the volume's height as approximately 41 centimetres; it does not give a full collation or leaf count for this specific copy in the description consulted for this record, which is recorded here as an open question rather than assumed.

Bound with the biblical text, as was standard for copies of this edition, is a separate genealogical work with its own title page: John Speed's The Genealogies recorded in the Sacred Scriptures according to euery family and tribe, with the line of Our Saviour Jesus Christ observed from Adam to the Blessed Virgin Mary, also imprinted by Robert Barker in 1611. Penn's catalogue record lists this as an accompanying item bound with the Bible.

The reading that identifies this copy

Penn's own digital catalogue record for this exact book states, in its own cataloguing language, that the copy is of the 'Great HE edition', and cites the diagnostic reading directly: at Ruth 3:15 the text reads 'and he went into the citie', where the corrected text used in all later printings reads 'she'. That is Penn's own identification of its own object, not an inference drawn by this record from general accounts of the edition.

This detail matters because two textually distinct states of the 1611 printing survive, commonly nicknamed the He Bible and the She Bible after this single pronoun, and copies are not interchangeable: a cataloguer, a dealer or a citing scholar needs to know which one a given book actually is. Penn's record answers that question for this copy directly, so this record does not need to guess.

The He Bible and She Bible: a genuine bibliographical dispute

The popular version of this story treats the He and She readings as a simple printer's slip caught and corrected mid-print-run, within a single edition. The scholarship is less tidy than that, and this record follows the scholarship rather than the popular version.

Herbert's Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525-1961, the standard reference bibliography for editions of the English Bible, catalogues the She Bible separately, under its own number, and states of it: 'Others more correctly style it the "second folio edition, 1613, 1611", inasmuch as it deserves to be reckoned a distinct edition.' The She Bible's general title page is dated 1613; its New Testament title page, reused or reprinted from 1611 stock, still reads 1611, which is why copies are sometimes catalogued under both years. This is a rare-book dealer's citation of Herbert rather than this record's own reading of Herbert's printed text, and is flagged for that reason.

Bible scholar David Norton has objected to calling the two 'He' and 'She' Bibles at all, on the grounds that the nicknames imply the two stand as equals, a pair, when the 1613 She Bible is, in his own description, 'genuinely a second edition' derived from the first. The bibliographer A.W. Pollard made the same point more sharply, objecting that the paired nicknames misleadingly suggest the books form a couple, when in fact, in his words, 'the second is derived from the first, as a child from its parents.' Against this near-consensus, F.H.A. Scrivener is recorded as one of the few scholars who argued the reverse chronology, that the Great She Bible in fact preceded the He Bible. Gordon Campbell has offered a different account of the reading's origin altogether, suggesting that the 'he' reading may descend from a deliberate change made by the Bishops' Bible translators rather than from a simple compositor's slip at the King James printing house, given genuine ambiguity in the underlying Hebrew and in which figure, Boaz or Ruth, the verse's subject is taken to be.

None of this scholarship is settled, and none of it concerns Penn's copy's own identity, which its own catalogue record already answers. It is included here because a reader relying only on the popular one-line summary would come away with a simpler and less accurate account of the textual history than the sources actually support.

Robert Barker and the cost of printing the King's Bible

Robert Barker held the crown's patent as King's Printer, inherited from his father Christopher Barker, who had secured the family's monopoly on printing the English Bible in 1589. It fell to Robert Barker to print the newly authorized translation once the translators' work was finished in 1611, and he financed the production himself, without direct funding from the crown, Parliament or the church.

The undertaking did not make him rich. By the account given in Wikipedia's biography of Barker, flagged here as a tertiary source pending a fuller scholarly biography, Barker gained little financial reward from printing what became the most important book in English religious life, and his later career was marked by disputes with rival printers over the Bible-printing patent, culminating in serious financial trouble. In 1631 an edition under his imprint became notorious as the 'Wicked Bible' after the word 'not' was dropped from the seventh commandment, reading 'Thou shalt commit adultery'; Barker and his partner were fined for the error. He was imprisoned for debt and, by this account, died in a debtors' prison in 1643.

The man who printed the book that became the standard English Bible for the next three and a half centuries did not, on the evidence available, profit from having done so.

Why the translation was commissioned

The translation that Barker printed originated at the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, convened by James I in response to Puritan grievances set out in the Millenary Petition presented at his accession. Among the outcomes was a royal commission for a new English translation of the Bible, to be undertaken without the marginal doctrinal notes that had made the Geneva Bible, the most widely read English Bible of the previous generation, objectionable to James on political as much as theological grounds: he regarded some of its notes as hostile to the divinely ordained authority of kings.

The work was divided among six companies of translators, two based at Westminster, two at Cambridge and two at Oxford, each responsible for a defined portion of the text, with a general committee of review meeting at Stationers' Hall in London from 1609. The translators are not named anywhere in the printed book. Their own account of their purpose and method survives in the preface bound into the first edition, 'The Translators to the Reader', discussed below.

The title page as argument, not just decoration

The engraved architectural title page, the work of the Antwerp-trained engraver Cornelis Boel, is not a neutral label. Its design is, so far as recorded sources describe it, the first title page of an English Bible to depict the Trinity: near the top, the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew letters for the divine name YHWH, appears above a dove representing the Holy Spirit, within a frame otherwise populated by figures reaching thirteen apostles (the twelve plus Matthias, who replaced Judas, and Paul, who described himself an apostle), each carrying a traditional identifying attribute. Moses and Aaron stand in niches flanking the central text panel, and the four Evangelists occupy the page's four corners with their traditional symbolic animals. At the foot of the page a pelican, in the old iconographic tradition, feeds her young from her own breast, a conventional emblem of Christ's self-sacrifice.

Read together, the programme states a claim about the book's authority before a reader turns past the title page: this translation stands in continuity with Moses and the Law, with the apostolic church, and with the Trinity itself, delivered under royal sanction. The design does not put the king's own image on the page. Its argument for the translation's authority is made through scriptural and ecclesiastical figures, not through James's own portrait.

What the translators said about their own work

The first edition included an eleven-page preface, 'The Translators to the Reader', written by Myles Smith, later Bishop of Gloucester, and printed at the front of the volume ahead of the biblical text itself. It does not survive in modern editions of the King James Version, having been dropped by publishers over the centuries that followed, but it was part of the book Barker printed in 1611 and is bound into copies of this edition.

In it the translators defend vernacular scripture directly: 'How shall men meditate in that, which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknowen tongue?' They defend revising earlier English translations rather than working from nothing, invoking Jerome's own precedent: 'Doe we condemne the ancient? In no case: but after the endevours of them that were before us, wee take the best paines we can in the house of God.' And they explain their use of marginal notes for genuinely uncertain readings, distinguishing matters of doctrine, which they hold to be clear, from points of translation where, in their words, 'fearefulnesse would better beseeme us then confidence.' They open the whole preface by addressing the king directly, crediting him, 'most dread Sovereign', with having set the project in motion.

This is the translators' own stated account of what the book was for: a scripture the ordinary reader could understand, built openly on the labour of predecessors, honest about points of real uncertainty, and undertaken under royal authority. It is reported here as what they said they believed and intended, not as a settled fact about the text's actual merits.

John Speed's genealogies, bound in and later misread

Bound with the Bible, and listed as an accompanying item in Penn's own catalogue record for this copy, is a separate genealogical work: John Speed's Genealogies recorded in the Sacred Scriptures, tracing scriptural family lines from Adam to the Virgin Mary, produced in collaboration with the Hebrew scholar Hugh Broughton and printed, like the Bible itself, by Robert Barker in 1611. Speed held a royal patent, granted in October 1610, to publish the work, and it was bound into copies of the Authorized Version for decades afterward.

Among its illustrations, by later published accounts, was a depiction of Noah's three sons repopulating the world after the Flood: Shem to Asia, Japheth to Europe, Ham to Africa. That reading of Genesis had a documented afterlife its makers did not intend: in later centuries, pro-slavery writers in colonial and antebellum America invoked the so-called Curse of Ham, a separate and much older interpretive tradition applied to Ham's line, to argue a biblical sanction for the enslavement of Africans. That later use belongs to the reception history of the Ham narrative in general, not to Speed's own genealogical chart or to what Speed or Barker intended by including it in 1611, and this record keeps the two apart rather than presenting the later misuse as part of the original object's own meaning.

Provenance: three centuries unaccounted for

Nothing in the sources consulted for this record documents who owned this copy between its printing in 1611 and its appearance, with a T. Edward Ross bookplate, in the Ross Bible Collection formed by the accountant and bibliophile T. Edward Ross. Ross, born in Ireland in 1868 and a co-founder of the accounting firm that became Coopers & Lybrand, assembled a collection of over one hundred printed Bible editions and three medieval manuscripts, ranging from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, that also includes Penn's copy of the 1613 She Bible, a different object from the one described in this record.

Ross gave his Bible collection to the University of Pennsylvania Library in 1946, in memory of Lucien Bonaparte Carpenter. A catalogue of the collection, principally the work of Clifford B. Clapp, was published by the university library the following year in an edition of two hundred copies. The book has remained in Pennsylvania's custody since the 1946 gift, held first by what was then the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library and, following later reorganization of Penn's special collections, by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, where it is catalogued today under the same call number, Folio BS185 1611 .L65, that appears in the university's older digitization record for the book as well as its current one.

How Ross acquired this particular copy, from whom, and when, is not recorded in any source available for this record. That gap is reported here rather than filled with a plausible guess.

What is still unresolved

Penn's catalogue record establishes which textual state this copy is and where it has been since 1946. It does not establish the book's history before that gift, its full physical collation, or the state of its binding, and this record does not supply those gaps from other copies' descriptions. A dealer's description of a different He Bible exemplar, cited elsewhere in this record for edition-level bibliographic identifiers, describes that other copy's condition and losses, not this one's, and the two must not be conflated.