The Bible’s so loaded with stuff which makes its elevated style ridiculous … The only way to save the ship is to jettison half the cargo.
—George Bernard Shaw to Bolton Hall, July 6, 1928Footnote 1The early twentieth century was a golden age for abridgment. Between the first and second World War, publishing in the United States came to be characterized by what the historians Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters aptly call “the culture of happy summary.”Footnote 2 Amid “ever-increasing masses of information” and a growing awareness of the complexity of new statistical data and a widening stream of information about scientific advances and global events, novel strategies of simplification were deployed “to relieve ordinary people of the burden of sorting.” Reader’s Digest was launched in 1922; Time in 1923. Emanuel Haldeman Julius sold more than five hundred million pocket-size Little Blue Books by condensing texts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Dialogues of Plato, or Chemistry for Beginners down to sixty-four 3½-inch by 5-inch pages.Footnote 3 “Abridgment, in all its forms, was seen as an antidote to information overload,” Cmiel and Peters write.Footnote 4
The printed Bible faced similar problems with information overload. For centuries, printers of Christian vernacular Bibles had addressed the complexity of this text by adding commentary, notes, maps, cross-references, and other explanatory materials.Footnote 5 The Bible became particularly overloaded with information as publishers sought to compete with organizations like the American Bible Society (ABS), who dedicated their resources to placing cheap copies of the Bible “without note or comment” in every American home. As Paul Gutjahr writes, since they could not compete with the ABS on price, “bible publishers increasingly turned their energies to producing bibles filled with more notes, more tables, more commentaries, more illustrations.”Footnote 6 If the cheap and unadorned Bibles distributed by the ABS gave rise to Bibles cluttered with commentary, these latter comment-dense versions made way for another niche in the market of this bestselling book: Bibles abridged for adult readers. These shortened Bibles would address the need for explanation of the Bible’s myriad difficulties in a different way: by eliminating those passages that seemed to require it.
While not the first attempts to abridge the good book, on the heels of the rediscovery of Thomas Jefferson’s abridgment of the Gospels in the 1890s and its subsequent publication by the United States Congress in 1904, so-called “short Bibles” emerged on the book market in droves, each with their own strategies of abridgment.Footnote 7 There were The Short Bible, The Shorter Bible, The Cambridge Shorter Bible, The Everyday Bible, The Pocket Bible, The Reader’s Bible, and The Reader’s Digest Bible. Footnote 8 Some of these abbreviated Bibles were redacted by biblical scholars, others by English professors, lawyers, rabbis, or, in one case, a collaboration between the Dartmouth College chaplain and a professor at Dartmouth’s Business School.Footnote 9 These modern redactors chipped away at the text by various methods, with varied understandings of what they each took to be the main substance of the biblical canon. In this way, the products they then sold as the first “readable” Bibles—a half, a third, or in some cases less than a fourth of the text’s original size—offered veiled reflections of the image of their creators. Peter Manseau writes that the Jefferson Bible was “a dropped rock that rippled across the twentieth century,” but the wider popularity of abridged Bibles in the decades that followed remains an overlooked chapter in the Bible’s reception history in the United States.Footnote 10
“The story of early twentieth-century culture is often told as one of cultural fragmentation,” Cmiel and Peters write.Footnote 11 Similar stories are told about the proliferation of different kinds of Bibles in this period—what Paul Gutjahr memorably called “a new type of Tower of Babel.”Footnote 12 But the fragmenting forces of modernity also gave rise to what Lewis Mumford termed “shock-absorbers” in the form of new techniques of streamlining and simplification.Footnote 13 These techniques provided coping mechanisms for an information-dense age, but they were also designed to meet the challenges of a new political moment. In the wake of women’s suffrage—what Christine Stansell calls “the single greatest act of mass enfranchisement of American history”—the education of ordinary citizens seemed essential to the future of democracy.Footnote 14 The Bible was understood by many to play a key role in the education of American citizens, but there were sharp disagreements about the substance of that education and the forms of faith and political life that familiarity with the text might yield.Footnote 15 While efforts to simplify Christian faith in the early decades of the twentieth century are often associated with the rise of fundamentalism, mainline Protestants put streamlining to their own uses as they attempted to distill the substance of faith in forms that could withstand the shocks of modern life. By looking at a single Bible abridgment project undertaken in the early twentieth century by a Presbyterian lawyer who came to believe that abridgment (whether of the tax system or of the Bible) could serve as a tool for political and social reform, this article examines short Bibles as important artifacts of this culture of happy summary and as evidence of this era’s hope in powers of simplification—that the truths of an ever more complex world could be reduced down, to powerful political effect.
Bolton Hall is better known to historians for his career as a political activist. His obituary in The New York Times identified him as the “originator of the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement,” recognizing his advocacy for single-tax policies and work on behalf of the poor.Footnote 16 The end of the obituary mentions his work on an abridged Bible, but the bold type identifies him as a disciple not of Jesus but of the political reformer and economist Henry George—a one-time mayoral candidate in New York City and a formative influence on the work of thinkers associated with the Social Gospel movement, including Walter Rauschenbusch. While George wrote one of the bestselling books of the late nineteenth century, his economic philosophy never seemed to gain ground with the wider public. Hall spent many years advancing George’s ideas about the simplification of the tax system and condensing his writing for wider audiences, hoping that abbreviation of both policy and social thought could be a tool for political reform.
In the last decades of his life, Hall applied these ideas in another arena, exposing what he saw as a powerful political vision at the heart of the Bible, excavated with the tools of an experienced editor with a strong aversion to repetition. Hall called his abridgement The Living Bible—a title that would be used again by Kenneth Taylor, whose paraphrase of the American Standard Version would become a bestseller in the early 1970s.Footnote 17 Though Hall’s version never came close to the prominence of Taylor’s, it offers a unique vantage from which to consider how attempts to streamline the Bible’s dizzying complexity in the early twentieth century mirrored broader endeavors to absorb and metabolize the disorienting shocks of a rapidly shifting modern world. In Hall’s campaigns for the single tax and back-to-the-land movements and in his redaction of the Bible, we see these labors of simplification intertwined.
A Little Land and the Single Tax
While Bolton Hall’s father, John Hall Magowan, served as the pastor at the prominent Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City for more than thirty years, his son was not a member of the clergy, nor was he a theologian like his younger brother.Footnote 18 In the decades that preceded Hall’s attempt to revise the Bible for modern readers, he built a career outside of religious spaces as a lawyer, organizer, and political activist with investments in the simplification of government and in land as a means of addressing the poverty that plagued many American cities at the turn of the century. These investments, while seemingly unrelated to the work of abridging an ancient scriptural canon, are essential to understanding both the method and the motivation that would inform Hall’s editorial work on The Living Bible.
As mentioned above, Hall’s work as a political activist was significantly shaped by the work of Henry George—a prominent nineteenth-century journalist whom theologian Walter Rauschenbusch called a “single-minded apostle of a great truth” and credited with his own awakening to both social problems and the Social Gospel.Footnote 19 In the wake of severe economic inequality that seemed to many a natural consequence of the gains of the Industrial Revolution, George called for a reformation of the social and economic order by an extensive simplification of the functions of government. “The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” he wrote. “Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized … we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence.”Footnote 20
In his bestselling Progress and Poverty—which sold better in its initial years of publication than any book except the Bible—George advanced a simple idea to ameliorate economic inequality in the United States that would become his legacy: a policy known as the “single tax.” Under this proposal, all taxes would be eliminated and replaced with a single tax on the unearned increments on land values. George argued that, if usable land had largely fallen into the hands of the wealthy few, taxing away the unearned profits on these lands would be a preferable alternative to the redistribution of property and a just means of correcting these substantive inequities. Simplifying the tax system in this way would free the state to pursue better ends, curb the gains of land monopolists, free land held for purposes of speculation, and reduce the tax burden of the poor. George worked for decades to persuade diverse audiences across the country and around the world that this one basic idea could yield more just and equitable societies.Footnote 21
As a model for this more just society, he looked to the figure of Moses, whom he described as a “politician, patriot, philosopher, statesman.” The prophetic message of Moses was to George a rejection of “the blasphemous doctrine, current now as it was three thousand years ago … that the want and suffering of the masses of mankind flow from a mysterious dispensation of providence which we may lament, but can neither quarrel with nor alter.”Footnote 22 Moses rejected not only the enslavement of his people but also the causes for that enslavement in “the possession by a class of the land upon which and from which the whole people must live.” In the commonwealth Moses established on the other side of the exodus, there was a total rejection of the “ceaseless toil” of Egypt. It was a commonwealth aimed “not at the protection of property, but the protection of humanity,” such that “every man should sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid.”Footnote 23 In George’s view, the United States had failed to live up to that Mosaic ideal. Its progress profited few and impoverished the masses. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of an unproductive rentier class, while laborers worked increasingly long hours to pay for increasingly expensive housing, struggling all the while to feed and clothe their families. “The promised land flies before us like the mirage,” George wrote. All the advances of the late nineteenth century seemed to cause rather than ameliorate suffering as “the fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch.”Footnote 24
Hall was inspired by George’s vision for the simplification of government and for a society that might offer each citizen unfettered access to their own vine and fig tree. He became what the historian Paul Avrich called “Henry George’s foremost disciple in the east” and dedicated much of his adult life to advancing George’s ideas in both print and practice.Footnote 25 Hall advocated for the single-tax proposal in countless newspaper articles and editorials and through his work with the New York Tax Reform Association and the Manhattan Single Tax Club.Footnote 26 He also amplified and extended George’s vision of the potential for unused lands to serve as a tool of social equality.Footnote 27 Drawing on a model of a successful experiment in Detroit that procured previously unused lands for unemployed workers to cultivate potato patches, Hall worked to establish a similar vacant lot farming program in New York City, complete with training to help families in need learn how to sustain themselves with the fruit of these lots.Footnote 28 Convinced that charity was not a sufficient means to address “the distress and unemployment of the masses, with the disease and crime incident thereto,” he submitted these community gardens as a sustainable alternative, arguing that “getting people back to the land” would “help people help themselves.”Footnote 29 In 1910, Hall expanded this project, deeding a farm property he owned about thirty miles outside of the city in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, to the Free Acres Association and creating “Free Acres”—one of ten experimental single-tax colonies established in the United States between 1895 and 1927.Footnote 30
During this period, Hall also wrote a number of books about sustenance farming, promoting a vision for what could be done with those lands currently held by the wealthy for the purposes of speculation, including Three Acres and Liberty, The Garden Yard, and A Little Land and a Living. Footnote 31 These books were amalgams of different kinds of material: arguments for the goods of city lot gardening projects, explanations of the single tax, excerpts from his correspondence with American farmers, and practical advice on everything from inexpensive methods of fertilization to the proper cultivation of mushrooms. In these texts, Hall outlines a vision for the role that land might play in social reform and the importance of releasing land to those who might use it. In A Little Land and a Living, he laments the condition of the American worker, condemned to a life of “hard, anxious work with little to show for it in the end”; such a worker would find the poet Robert Browning’s psalm to “the wild joys of living” incomprehensible.Footnote 32 The answer to the crisis of poverty in American cities was simple: provide broader access to the land to enable the working class to provide for themselves. “Get your feet on the soil,” Hall writes, “draw from it not only wealth but health and the joy of the earth—not only a living but Life.”Footnote 33
Hall’s writings during this period were not explicitly religious, but like George he often drew on biblical imagery to commend his political and agrarian vision to readers. In Things as They Are, Hall critiqued prevailing approaches to economic wisdom that recommended “charity” as the sole means of addressing social ills. Drawing on language from Jesus’s sermons in the Gospel narratives, he called his readers “first, to understand that the present state of the world is hell—that is, injustice; second, to realise that there is a kingdom of heaven,—that is, of justice; and, third, to believe that we can get there.”Footnote 34 In Three Acres and Liberty, Hall again had recourse to biblical language to cast this kingdom in agrarian terms as both the original and the ideal state for human life:
Life belongs in the garden. Do you remember—the first chapters of Genesis show us our babyhood in a garden … and the last chapter of the Apocalypse leaves us with the vision of the garden in the holy city … where the trees yield their fruits every month and bear leaves of universal healing. Just so will it be in our holy cities of the future—the garden will be right there “in our midst.”Footnote 35
Hall drew on images from the opening chapters of Genesis that are recapitulated as an image of hope and healing in the book of Revelation as he called his readers to return to Eden, and to clear the way toward Eden for others, by surrendering vacant lots to become city gardens or by playing a role in one of the many single-tax colonies springing up in places such as Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, and Alabama.Footnote 36
While the movement for the single tax gained some traction at the beginning of the twentieth century, after Henry George’s death in 1897, the movement seemed to have lost its steam.Footnote 37 Despite the fact that Progress and Poverty had been a bestseller in its time, George’s disciples began to worry that those who bought Progress and Poverty might not have read all of the nearly 600-page book.Footnote 38 Among Hall’s papers, there is evidence that he shared these concerns. He wrote, “Progress and Poverty is a difficult book, and even when read, leaves but a blurred impression upon most minds.”Footnote 39 Across the East River from Hall’s home in Manhattan, a quote from Progress and Poverty was inscribed on George’s tombstone at the Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn that suggested George may have harbored similar questions about the future of the movement: “The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance … if that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends—those who toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This is the power of truth.”Footnote 40
Together with others in the single-tax movement, Hall worked to make his mentor’s political vision less obscure in the decades after George’s passing. He wrote countless letters to magazine and newspaper editors, summarizing the philosophy of the single tax for diverse audiences and making the case for this policy amid new social and political challenges in the early twentieth century. He also began to think more broadly about strategies for helping revolutionary ideas find easier acceptance among the general public.
Abridgment and The Living Bible
Alongside advocating for “the great simplification” of government in the form of the single tax, Hall also tried his hand at a different kind of simplification: literary abridgment. In 1897, the year that Henry George died, Hall published a short collection of philosophical fables under the title Even as You and I that was marketed as a “presentation, by means of popular and simple allegories, of the doctrine of the late Henry George.”Footnote 41 One review praised the volume for its powerful condensation of George’s work, claiming that “no argumentative interpretation could do for Progress and Poverty what is done for it in this series of pictures.”Footnote 42 In the wake of this success, Hall began work on other abridgment projects, including What Tolstoy Taught, which Hall claimed to preserve the whole of Leo Tolstoy’s nonfiction, freed of “tediously careful repetition.”Footnote 43 In the introduction, Hall wrote, “I believe this volume contains the substance of everything that Tolstoy taught,” going so far as to claim that the substance of Tolstoy’s novels was also contained in this volume since “Tolstoy’s fiction but popularizes or illustrates the doctrine of what he regarded as his only important works.”Footnote 44 Hall received praise for these abridgments from Tolstoy’s American biographer Aylmer Maude and from Tolstoy himself, who said that Hall’s paraphrase of “On Life” was “very good and renders in concise form quite truly the chief ideas of my book.”Footnote 45
During this period, Hall offered many arguments for the virtues of abridgment. The same year that he published What Tolstoy Taught, he wrote an editorial in The New York Times arguing that classic authors like Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy were simply “too prolix” for most readers. Citing the fact that more abridged copies of Tolstoy’s philosophical meditation On Life had been sold than the original, Hall wrote that both Scott and Tolstoy suffer from “the lack of what we call the ‘editorial sense’; that is, knowledge of what is really of interest to the reader.”Footnote 46 He continued to develop his philosophy of abridgment in the introduction to What Tolstoy Taught, where he wrote: “most people want to get a clear impression of the matured views of the Prophets, not of how they developed, changed, and were often recanted.”Footnote 47 Hall found a kind of calling in translating the writing of prophetic thinkers into shorter form. He wrote, “it may be that it is given to me to help carry on Tolstoy’s great work, in some measure to extend the influence of his writings and his life.”Footnote 48
A decade later, in correspondence with both potential publishers and close friends in the early 1920s, Hall expressed interest in a new abridgment project: a modern, paraphrased Bible. Given the success of his previous efforts at abridgement, he wanted to offer readers a condensed version of this bestselling text that would preserve its powerful images and wisdom while shedding the layers of needless prolixity and repetition that overlaid them. While he was familiar with a few recently published abridgments of the Bible, Hall was persuaded that his own talents as an editor could improve upon prior attempts. As he once wrote in a letter to the economist Harry Gunnison Brown, “I consider myself rather an expert on condensation.”Footnote 49
Bolton Hall first reached out to his contacts at the Macmillan Company about the commercial possibilities of an abridged Bible in 1924.Footnote 50 While they were initially interested, Macmillan later passed on the project, after sending portions of Hall’s manuscript out to reviewers who identified substantive concerns with his editorial approach and worried that much had been lost in the attempt to reduce the text to its bare necessities. One reviewer complained, “I can discover no principle upon which the reduction of the total Biblical literature is based.”Footnote 51 Hall proceeded to contact several other publishers about the project before finding a home for his abridged Bible with Alfred A. Knopf in 1926.
Hall encountered some obstacles early in the process when Knopf discovered that Hall had produced his initial manuscript not from a single translation of the Bible but using language from the Authorized Version, the King James Version, and the Revised Version, together with Hall’s own paraphrases or creative rewordings—a choice that would make copyright permissions difficult. Overwhelmed by Knopf’s request that he start again on the manuscript, preserving the diction of a single translation and eliminating all “editorial additions or interpolations” that were not “clearly designated as such,” Hall insisted that someone at Knopf take on the labor of revising the manuscript according to these proposed revisions.Footnote 52 Knopf refused.Footnote 53 Hall eventually made the requested changes, submitting a manuscript abridged strictly from the text of the King James Version with a subtitle that betrayed his characteristic confidence about his effectiveness as an editor: The Living Bible: Being the Whole Bible in Its Fewest Words. Footnote 54
In the years leading up to publication, Hall began clearing the ground for his own shorter Bible, pointing out the deficiencies in other abbreviated or modernized translations. He wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times complaining about James Moffatt’s A New Translation of the Bible. While this version of the text would “find readers,” Hall lamented the fact that Moffatt “seems to change the text for the sake of changing, often to the injury both of the meaning and of the style.”Footnote 55 In a note to his publisher, he wrote that, while Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Story of the Bible “has sold very largely … it is difficult to see how it could be worse done … he leaves out most of the striking and exciting incidents.”Footnote 56 Amid these varied abridgements of the Bible currently on the market, Hall argued that there was still room for a different approach. As he was preparing his manuscript, he noted that “it seems strange that among the scores of versions of the Bible and stories of the Bible it has not before occurred to anyone to render it stripped only of its repetition and verbiage in its own magnificent prose from the Authorized Version.”Footnote 57
Hall’s philosophy of abridgment is evident in the title of his abbreviated canon: reduce the text of the Bible down to the core of its message to help modern readers see this ancient book as a “living” text. In the preface, he wrote that his Bible “attempts to present in condensed form the entire contents of the Scriptures, omitting only repetitions, ceremonial details, most genealogies, land-boundaries, and matter that is no longer of general interest.” He explained that in editing the Bible he wanted to “convey the message of each writer without the elaboration of thought unnecessary to the presentation of the idea.”Footnote 58 In a letter to a friend, Hall wrote: “One of the reasons that people do not read the Bible is that the thing they would enjoy is often so hopelessly buried amid sands of words, needless repetitions, and uninteresting ceremonial details, that the untrained reader lays the book down with a sigh and opens it no more.”Footnote 59 He worked to remedy this ill by editing the text of the Bible in the same way that he had abridged previous texts and in the way that he had come to revise what he wrote and read in previous decades.
Hall’s editing habits were extensive. He revised articles or letters he received from friends and colleagues as he was reading them—crossing out words, sentences, or entire paragraphs, rephrasing various sections in the margins, always working toward the clearest version of a given idea. A revision he made to a letter he received from the journalist Poultney Bigelow offers insight into the strategies that animated his own abridgment efforts. Bigelow wrote to Hall in 1928 praising his abridged Bible, saying that “no greater service could be done to the world of today than to rescue the literary and philosophical treasures of the Bible from the hands of a bigoted priesthood … a Christian Bible purged of its needless chronologies and cruelties and sexual indecencies is much needed by scholars.”Footnote 60 With a blue pencil, Hall crossed out the terms “cruelties and sexual indecencies”—two things he did not mind keeping in his living Bible.
In correspondence with friends and publishers, Hall called his abridged text the first truly “readable” Bible, one he hoped would remedy a decline in biblical literacy that he had witnessed even in his own household. The ABS had labored for more than a century to get a copy of the Bible into the homes of every American, but Hall argued that these efforts were not enough to address the limits of ordinary readers’ time and attention. In a letter he wrote to the ABS after his own version was published, encouraging them to consider distributing his abridgment and citing its particular appeal to female readers, he commented:
In my judgment, not one Bible in ten that is given away or sold at a small price, ever gets itself read. The rising generation will not read the Bible; my own daughter, I regret to say has never read any considerable part of it, because she finds so much of it dull or unintelligible. Even my Secretary, who was little more than a High School Flapper, read all of the Living Bible in her moments of abstraction from the charms of the Ladies Home Journal and the tabloid press.Footnote 61
Hall believed his abbreviated canon could compete with the distractions of the age and referred to it as a text “stripped for action.”Footnote 62 Soon after The Living Bible was published, he was commended for his efforts to eliminate needless repetition by his friend the Irish author and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw praised Hall’s redaction, telling him: “the Bible’s so loaded with stuff which makes its elevated style ridiculous (like the Elizabethan plays and blank verse) and so much of the stuff is obsolete or totally uninteresting that the only way to save the ship is to jettison half the cargo.”Footnote 63
Hall cast off as jetsam any material from the biblical canon he deemed repetitive, but he decided that no book should be cast out entirely. The royal histories of 1 and 2 Chronicles lost the most material: Hall edited these books down from a combined sixty-five chapters to two short pages. He removed nearly every reference to temple rituals and sacrifices from the book of Leviticus, keeping only the passage about the scapegoat on the day of atonement referenced by New Testament writers, together with small pieces of the legislation around debt forgiveness, gleaning, quarantine, and bearing false witness. He also made significant cuts to the text of New Testament, reducing a few epistles down to three or four sentences and harmonizing the four Gospel narratives into a single linear text he retitled “The Gospels.”
Hall also applied this editorial technique to individual passages that seemed to repeat the content of previous texts. Faced with the tensions between the two creation accounts at the beginning of Genesis, he rearranged verses at the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2. The text of Genesis 1:26 (“And God said, let us make man after our likeness”) is followed sequentially in Hall’s Living Bible by an insertion of Genesis 2:7 (“The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”) before the text returns to the text of Genesis 1:27 (“In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”) By reassembling the text of these two stories, Hall gave the appearance of a seemingly linear creation narrative to open his Living Bible.
Hall’s method led to some problems in the abridgment process. Biblical scholars who reviewed the version of the text he submitted to Macmillan were dismayed by what he had done to the poetic sections of the canon, claiming that he had “ruined wonderful passages in the interest of brevity.”Footnote 64 In response to these criticisms in the initial reader reports, Hall wrote his editor and explained, “What I tried to follow in the Psalms and the Prophets was to include the phrases that seemed to me poetic or striking, omitting that which was purely devotional.”Footnote 65 One reviewer lamented that Hall had failed to understand the parallel structure of Hebrew poetry by falsely assuming that its “metrical form is an instance of literary prolixity.”Footnote 66 In response, Hall wrote: “it seems to me that the balance of the sentences in the Psalms … used as an ornament in poetry, and not very apprehensible to our readers, and like in many of our rhymes, were put in because the balance was needed and not because it made any real addition.”Footnote 67
These criticisms of his redaction of the Bible’s poetic materials were echoed in reviews of the final version that Hall published with Knopf. In the version of The Living Bible that went to press, many Psalms were reduced to a single line or stanza. Psalm 33, a hymn to a God who takes great care with the world he has made—gathering the waters of the sea into a bottle and fashioning the hearts of those who inhabit the dry land—is reduced to a single proverbial line about horses which now appears as a kind of riddle: “A horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.”Footnote 68 Hall’s reaction to criticisms of his condensation of biblical poetry continued to be guided by his conviction that he had removed nothing of true substance from the canon. Responding to one reviewer who praised The Living Bible but wrote that they preferred poetic texts like Job or the Psalms in the original version, Hall wrote, “I defy anyone who has no special interest in it to read the whole of Job which is inexpressively tedious owing to the abundance of platitude, and I think the same thing is true of the Psalms.”Footnote 69
Even those who praised Hall’s redaction of the Bible had some concerns about his approach to repetition. After he encouraged Hall to “jettison half the cargo,” George Bernard Shaw added a concern about some of the cargo Hall had identified as redundant. “The question of repetition is a complicated one,” Shaw wrote; “when the same story is told twice over, cut out the repetition by all means. But when different accounts are given of the same events, then the omission of any of them, or any attempt to reconcile them by combining them may be in effect a fraud.”Footnote 70 In a separate letter, Shaw reiterated this point: “You cannot possibly combine Matthew and Mark with Luke, or the three of them with John without making a sort of three-headed monster of Jesus, and representing him as at the same time a popular metropolitan preacher and a wandering provincial evangelist.”Footnote 71 Shaw encouraged Hall to retain the tensions between the Gospels and between the creation stories at the opening of Genesis. Hall did not take this advice.
Hall’s brother—Thomas Cumming Hall, a professor of ethics who wrote frequently on the New Testament and consulted on his brother’s abridgment of the text—had similar objections to Bolton’s redaction of the Pauline epistles, arguing that he had “left out too much to really give an idea of Paul and his type of mind.”Footnote 72 Hall replied to his brother, indicating that, while he would make some of the changes his brother proposed to the redaction of the epistles, “I am writing to make the [Bible] readable to the millions; and I do not think one reader in a thousand cares a hoot about the arguments of Paul … the dramatic epigrammatic and human expression of Paul is what they like as far as they know it.” In the final version, Hall brought back some of the material he had originally cut to try and satisfy his brother’s concerns, though he still committed himself to producing a version of the text in which he might “play up Paul’s rhetoric unencumbered with his ill based logic.”Footnote 73
Hall ran into a similar set of problems when it came to abridging the words of Moses. In an unpublished note, he wrote that “Moses in his seven speeches which make up the book of Deuteronomy goes over the same ground again and again with which we have already been familiar in Genesis and Exodus … the mind wearies of the constant repetition of themes, like, ‘The Lord thy God which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage.’”Footnote 74 Hall cut down these speeches substantially, reducing Moses’s fourth speech, which takes up two chapters in the original text of Deuteronomy, to just two sentences. In an early draft of The Living Bible, he went so far in his cuts to these speeches that he cut the text of Deuteronomy 6:4, deleting in its entirety the text of the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”) after identifying it as a paradigmatic example of the Bible’s penchant for needless repetition. In a letter to his brother, he wrote, “I first omitted (from Isaiah I think, I have not the m/s here) the thing I since learned every devout Jew repeats every day: ‘The Lord our God is one God—& c.’ I omitted that because it was clearly repetitious but of course, as it would immediately be missed, it should be included.” After this incident, Hall sought out a biblical scholar who could help him identify those redactions that might omit by accident “some passages … of controversial or historical importance, where I could not know it except by chance.”Footnote 75
Hall’s aversion to repetition is the consistent theme behind the texts redacted from The Living Bible, but additional themes emerge from the texts Hall chose to preserve. In Genesis, for example, while many better-known passages featuring promises from God or the blessings of children disappear, Hall preserves two lesser-known passages relating to the sale of land: the acquisition of land for the burial of Sarah in Genesis 23 and the purchase of land from the citizens of Egypt during the time of the famine in Genesis 47. In both stories, we meet figures in desperation—a bereaved widower, a starving people—who are provided with a means of meeting their needs through land. In the first story, “the field and the cave therein were made sure to Abraham for a possession,” enabling him to bury Sarah and later enabling his grieving sons to bury him alongside her. In the second story, the people beg Joseph for a means by which to feed themselves, volunteering to surrender the ownership of their lands to Pharaoh in exchange for food: “give us seed, that the land be not desolate.”Footnote 76 Joseph agrees and scatters the people, appointing them to plots of land across the territory of Egypt and providing them with the means to produce sustenance from that land. “Here is seed for you,” Joseph says, “and ye shall sow the land.”Footnote 77 Thus, while several passages featuring the promises of God are removed from this cut of Genesis, the promise of land as a means of provision for both the living and the dead takes a central role. This eccentric approach to redacting Genesis reflects the commitments that grounded Hall’s earlier work: land was the true source of promise, the ideal of a simplified life, and the seedbed of a truly equitable society.
The Living Bible was published in 1928. Advertisements claimed that Hall had reduced the text to “one third its original size,” but in its final form the book was not all that small. Between its large type, prefatory materials, section headings, and use of thicker paper, the 423-page text was comparable to the size of an average Bible. The Living Bible sold for $6.00—twice the price of the typical novel in this period and ten times the cost of some versions of the Bible distributed by the ABS.Footnote 78 In later correspondence, Hall complained about the “prohibitive price” of The Living Bible, insisting that his contract had indicated it would be sold for less.Footnote 79 He blamed that price for the book’s low sales figures, which prevented Knopf from approving a second printing.Footnote 80
The Living Bible was met with mixed reviews. Norman Lustig declared it a triumph in his review in The Brooklyn Citizen. “At last, after some 546 years, the Bible has been edited,” Lustig wrote; “it is an amazing accomplishment … and will mark a tremendous stride in the popularization of the Bible.” He proclaimed that Hall’s abridgment offered “the complete Bible, here as a continued story—not subject to entirely unnecessary (again from the standpoint of the general reader) diversions, imbecilities, etc.”Footnote 81 A review in the Chicago Tribune similarly praised Hall’s edited text, writing that “he has extracted from the King James version all of the begats and the Lord saiths … but he has retained all of the literary beauty of the Bible.”Footnote 82
When Gilbert Thomas reviewed Hall’s abridged Bible for The Nation, he took a different view. He wrote, “we fail to see why we should spend fifteen shillings on an authorized version reduced to a third of its normal size, when we can so easily ignore, in an ordinary edition, what we do not wish to read. But ‘The Living Bible’ is printed in America, where apparently people are ready to pay for predigested spiritual, as well as physical food.”Footnote 83 In response to this review, Hall wrote a letter claiming that Thomas had “largely missed the point.” He continued,
This is not a Bible-reading age, and yet there can be no question that that involves an irreparable loss to this and coming generations. One of the reasons that people do not read the Bible is that the thing they would enjoy is buried amid sands of words, needless repetitions and uninteresting ceremonial details, that the untrained reader lays the book down with a sigh and opens it no more.Footnote 84
In Hall’s view the Bible was too wordy for modern readers. Like the writings of George or Tolstoy, it would not be read at all if it were not condensed. In response to another reviewer, who asked him to clarify the terms of his title—specifically “what would a dead Bible be?”—Hall responded by making an analogy between his Bible and his political work: “a Living wage is a wage that a man can live on; a Living Bible is one that helps to proper work and life. A dead Bible would seem to me to be one that is buried in dead languages or forms.”Footnote 85 In his career as an activist, Hall had advocated for radically streamlining the tax system and offering the least fortunate a simple means to provide for themselves by providing access to tillable land. In his career as an editor, he had similar hopes for the power of simplification: reducing powerful but complex texts down to necessary sustenance, leaving nothing and no one behind.
The question of why a lawyer and political activist would turn, in the last decades of his life, to the long and tedious labor of abridging the biblical canon is worthy of consideration. Hall’s religious beliefs were eclectic. While he drew on language and stories from the Bible in his writing, he also had recourse to ideas from the Qur’an and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. In an early letter to Alfred Knopf, Hall wrote that the Bible seems to him “no more inspired than Shakespeare or Emerson.” In this same letter, he added a comment that provides an insight into why he wished to take on this project at this particular moment: “I think the Fundamentalists will welcome our Living Bible—because it can be and will be really read—and will afterwards wish that they had condemned it.”Footnote 86
A year before Hall began work on his Bible, the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1923 voted to condemn the preaching of Harry Emerson Fosdick by a narrow majority and to establish five fundamentals of belief, including a commitment to the inerrancy of the biblical text and a belief in the virgin birth.Footnote 87 This effort was led by William Jennings Bryan, who would further these ideas on the national stage when he served as the lawyer for the prosecution in the highly publicized Scopes trial. The same year, Hall wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times objecting to the declarations of the General Assembly: “I am a member in good standing of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (my father’s) and am much interested in the Presbyterian faith: I was brought up on the shorter catechism. The assembly has stated in its five points clearly and admirably almost every religious tenet which I do not believe.”Footnote 88
While Hall objected to this particular condensation of Christian belief, he began his work on a shorter Bible the next year—convinced, it seems, that the Bible was worth reading and that those given the opportunity to actually read it in a streamlined fashion would be able to resist the pull of other attempts to simplify the Christian faith. In a letter to the American architect Ernest Flagg after his Bible’s publication, Hall wrote: “my own religion is far from conventional, it was for that reason that I gave the Version of the Bible as much care and pains. People believe the Bible simply because they have not read it. I made a Bible that they can and will read, but cannot and will not believe.”Footnote 89 While Hall’s many years of work abridging the Bible speak to a faith in the power of this text, he had a different understanding about the truths at the heart of that text than many of his contemporaries, as well different ideas about the political ends toward which those truths might be directed.
The historian Dona Brown argues that “Hall was not particularly interested in making a profit from his books.” She cites the fact that Hall had brought out many previous books under his own self-financed imprint. She also identifies a notice that Hall published in a journal for social workers in which he offered to lend his books to any interested parties. “Hall did not depend on book sales for his living, but he was still in some sense a professional author: he wanted his books widely read and he expended a good deal of effort distributing them.”Footnote 90 Hall’s archives bear the traces of a more complicated story, however—at least about his work on the abridged Bible. His literary agent, Jean Wick, wrote to him in 1923, citing the rationale he had provided her when he first pitched the abridgment: “books on the Bible always sell.” After giving him some advice on a manuscript in progress, including the need to distinguish it from similar abridgment projects, she concluded, “I have every hope that we are going to make gobs of money.”Footnote 91 In a note to his brother, Hall mentioned that someone at Macmillan told him they sold “over half a million copies of Moulton’s Modern Reader’s Bible.”Footnote 92 Hall saved advertisements for Bibles or biblical commentaries, circling or underlining the number of books sold. He wrote to the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, asking them for sales figures on Charles M. Sheldon’s bestselling novel In His Steps. Footnote 93 In an essay he wrote the year before his Bible was published, Hall discussed the broader commercial possibilities of Bible publishing, citing statistics from the ABS which indicate that “no less than 30,000,000 volumes of Scripture” are sold each year.Footnote 94 He continued, “The religious side of book-selling has been greatly neglected by our publishers and book-sellers. The field for anything enlightening or inspiring in the religious way appears to be now far larger than the field for the most popular novel of the best-known writer.”Footnote 95
Hall had reasons to be concerned about money. He filed for bankruptcy a few decades before his work on The Living Bible, after his law firm failed in 1886, though he was able to settle with his creditors and withdraw his petition in 1899.Footnote 96 He lived for most of his adult life in wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan but in houses owned by his relatives.Footnote 97 He was a man with considerable power and influence who frequently corresponded with presidents and senators, but he also quibbled with editors when he was paid at a rate per word lower than he expected.Footnote 98
With all that in mind, it is nevertheless possible that Hall’s interest in the commercial possibilities of abridging the Bible may have been a reflection not only of his own economic interests but also of his populist principles—his desire for truths to reach the masses in forms which they might comprehend. This possibility is supported by the fact that when he wrote to the ABS in 1928, campaigning for his own version of the Bible to replace their distribution of the standard King James Version, he insisted that he would not take any royalties from the sale. He encouraged the board of the society to “make a Bible that would really be read by those to whom it was given,” arguing that his version of the text did in fact “contain the whole gist of the Holy Scriptures” and that distributing a truly readable Bible would be a “popular and public service.”Footnote 99
When Hall was asked by a journalist to explain the motivation behind his attempts to abridge the Bible for modern readers, he spoke as he had before about the text’s deep wisdom and “dramatic power.” He then added, “I desire to open a wider outlet for my own sociologic views not in any way conveyed by the Bible.”Footnote 100 In Hall’s notes, a plan emerges along these lines to follow up The Living Bible in Its Fewest Words with another attempt to abridge the thought of Henry George, by condensing his magnum opus into a volume that he referred to in parallel terms as Progress and Poverty in Its Fewest Words. Footnote 101 In previous letters and speeches, Hall had often compared his mentor’s text to the Bible, arguing that both texts provided readers with a full and well-rounded education: “Many people have been able to educate themselves entirely through the Bible, just as some do through Progress and Poverty, both in a literary, emotional, and logical way.”Footnote 102 As he abridged the Bible for what he knew to be a broad readership, Hall may have been hoping to generate a larger audience who would follow him to his next project as he again tried to condense the ideas of Henry George for a new generation.
Conclusion
The rise of abridged Bibles in the first half of the twentieth century reflects a later stage of what Peter J. Thuesen once identified as the “iconoclastic biblicism” of the English Reformation—a “peculiarly modern valorization of the translated and printed word” that elevated an ever-evolving commitment to vernacular scripture over traditional authorities.Footnote 103 In this period, vernacular translation took on new meanings, as a new generation of reformers came to see the biblical text itself as an icon that needed to be broken open to get to the “spirit” or “life” of the text within its aged frame. Thomas Jefferson—himself a hobby archaeologist—once compared his own attempt to abridge the Gospels to mining “diamonds from dunghills.”Footnote 104 When the librarian Melvil Dewey wrote to Hall celebrating what he saw as the triumph of his friend’s Bible abridgment project, he framed this redaction in similar terms: “This will giv [sic] us the biblical maple sugar without the deluge of sap.”Footnote 105 Hall was confident that his Living Bible was a fitting synecdoche of the good book—nothing was left out that was truly worth reading.
Cmiel and Peters explain that the early twentieth-century “culture of happy summary” was “happy because of the sense that nothing significant was lost by these abridgments.”Footnote 106 Experts could effectively simplify complex information, reducing knowledge without remainder. Two decades later, in the wake of World War II, radical optimism about the powers of simplification would ebb, replaced with concerns about “the heresy of paraphrase.”Footnote 107 Revelations about the horrors of the Holocaust and the apocalyptic power of atomic energy also spurred an erosion of public trust in authorities once relied upon to streamline and disperse information.Footnote 108
Bolton Hall was a popularizer—a man who became discouraged about the waning influence of the leading progressive thinkers of his time and worried that their ideas might be lost without efforts to condense them. In a draft for what he called an “Uncommonplace Book,” he wrote down a brief thought on the ephemerality of human words and the hope that they might somehow resonate over time: “There is reason to believe that the vibrations of every sound persist though with diminishing intensity. The microphone can make the faintest sounds, like the trampling of a fly’s legs, audible. Perhaps the next discovery will enable us to catch ‘on the air’ voices long since stilled to us. Maybe Moses reading the Ten Commandments.”Footnote 109
As he abridged Henry George’s writings about Moses, Leo Tolstoy’s teachings on the kingdom of heaven, and the story of Moses coming down with the tablets from Sinai, Hall worked to amplify voices that he worried might otherwise be lost to time. His approach to abridgment—whether of the scriptures or of the tax code—was at once conservative and reformist. In freeing the ideas of these revolutionary thinkers from the repetition, tedium, and imperfection that impeded their reception, he tried to preserve the sustaining wisdom of the past for posterity and to illuminate by condensation the elements of these traditions that might make for a radically different future.
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