Nineteen Years From a Synod's Vote to a Finished Bible

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.