THE EXCLUDED SCHOLAR: HUGH BROUGHTON

Other issues of importance were raised by one of the most eminent English Hebrew scholars of the time, the dogmatic and contentious Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). Although he was not included among the King James translators, he gave them the benefit of his advice; his arguments about translation were as familiar to the KJB translators as anyone's.

He believed in the divinely inspired infallibility and perfection of both Testaments (but not of the Apocrypha). So, writing in connection with the work then being done on the KJB, he declares, ‘the Old Testament is all written in the Jew's tongue, and God's style passing all man's wit, and maketh up one body, having not one word idle or wanting’. This premise, coupled with a refusal to admit any possibility of textual corruption, leads to his entire scholarly effort, which is to ‘clear’ the Scriptures, that is, open their true meaning so that the consistency, the ‘one body, having not one word idle or wanting’, is revealed. Much of this involves reconciliation of apparent conflicts (there can be no real conflicts in a divinely inspired text) of chronology and genealogy. Broughton's first work, A Consent of Scripture (1588), tried to harmonise Scripture chronology, and he continued to hold forth on this subject to the end of his life. Literary questions are necessarily involved, and he is frequently at pains to distinguish literal and figurative language in the text. For instance, he propounds as a principle of interpretation that ‘the first penner of the matter and all writers of it must use all certain and sure plainness, until all doubts be removed’.