Old Bibles

This past weekend I read some information about John Eliot's work in translating the Bible into one of the languages spoken by Indigenous peoples in New England. I was quite delighted to discover that his work – originally intended to support the Christianization of the natives – has NOW become useful in language reclamation projects. On the American Antiquarian Society's website, under a heading "From English to Algonquin: Early New England Translations," I found this overview of current projects: 

The Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Mohegan people are now working to reclaim their language. Colonization, assimilation, and the loss of sovereignty caused these once widely spoken native dialects to be lost over time. Today, tribes use the Algonquian Bible, Massachuset Psalter, Indian Grammar, Williams’s Key to the Language of America, and other primary Algonquian language texts to piece together a language that has not been spoken in centuries.

The WÔPANÂAK Language Reclamation Project (wlrp.org) is especially interesting. On display is part of a bible page translated into Wôpanâak by John Eliot in 1663 (published in 1685). "The existence of this bible and other legal documents written in the Wôpanâak langauge has made the reclamation efforts possible. Click ... to see a full digital version of the Bible."  

Full digital version of the 1685 Bible translated by John Eliot and his helpers

Wow! I had not realized that John Eliot's famous Bible could be so easily viewed. VERY impressive - with over 1200 pages!  Years ago, when visiting libraries at Yale, I did see an example of John Eliot's Bible - locked securely in a display case. I'd heard family stories that we were somehow related to John Eliot. But I did not at that time know any details, nor even know if the story might be true. 

Now as I explored the online version, I found the Psalms near the very end.  Here's what the 23rd Psalm looks like in Wôpanâak:  

Click to enlarge this screenshot 

To compare this to English, I looked on my own bookshelves, expecting to find the blue-covered Bible I'd had since high school. But my eyes didn't spot it. Instead, I reached higher, and looked through the shelf of OLD books inherited from older relatives (see photo at top of this post). I found two Bibles there. I pulled down the big tall one, an 1834 publication, and took a photo of the 23 Psalm:   

Click on image to enlarge

I did not solve the question of why the Psalms were so far to the end of John Eliot's Bible; I did confirm that the Psalms come much earlier (in midst of the Old Testament) on the English version, as I had expected. But then I became distracted by new discovery... 

SURPRISE!  Thumbing through that 1834 Bible, I noticed a "FAMILY RECORD" section between the Old and New Testaments. Just two leaves, double-sided, covered in handwritten notes about Marriages, Births and Deaths, mostly concerning Williams Johnson and his wife Merilda Paddock.  The name Paddock really jumped out as familiar. I spent the next few hours studying the information there, comparing it to genealogical charts, and uploading photos of those special pages of family history. See my separate post titled, "Paddock."