Frye, Northrop. “Language I.” In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, pp. 3-30. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Frye discusses the linguistic problems inherent in Bible translation, remarking that translated narratives, particularly the English Bibles and Luther's Bible, are texts with rich arrays of new images, idioms, and allusions. According to Frye, these translations in many ways defined modern European culture.

A sacred book is normally written with at least the concentration of poetry, so that, like poetry, it is closely involved with the conditions of its language. The Koran, for instance, is so interwoven with the special characteristics of the Arabic language that in practice Arabic has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Jewish commentary and scholarship, whether Talmudic or Kabbalistic in direction, have always, inevitably, dealt with the purely linguistic features of the Hebrew text of the Old...