We will be in a museum today contemplating dinosaurs with our 5-year-old and 8-year old grandchildren. Libaries and museums are marvellous places offering insights on the world that inform us and stretch our imaginations. Many of them are under threat due to underfunding and authoritarian control.
I would love to wander through a new exhibition at Yale Library which explores the history of typos across five centuries. Visitors will see corrections that were listed inside copies of works by James Joyce, Upton Sinclair and Nicolaus Copernicus.
Perhaps the timeliest of the lot is an an infamous 1631 edition of the Bible, which lists “Thou shalt commit adultery” as the seventh commandment earning it the nickname “the Wicked Bible.” According to a Smithsonian article; " By the time the mistake was discovered, 1,000 copies had been printed. The British king Charles I reprimanded the publishers, fined them £300 and stripped them of their printing license...Nearly all the Wicked Bibles were destroyed, and only about 20 known copies survive. In the copy on view at the Beinecke, someone fixed the error by hand, adding “not” to “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
We know that a certain warmongering president sells his special bibles to the gullible and I wonder if anyone has checked to see if this version is "wicked." This erroneous commandment would apply to Trump, a number of the members of his cabinet and his "spiritual advisor" Paula White.
Truthfully, I'm more concerned by all the passages about justice and mercy and care for the marginalized effectively edited out of bibles these days. That really is wicked.
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