Bay Psalm Book

Bay Psalm Book, common hymnal of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Written by Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Weld, it was published in 1640 at Cambridge as The Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Metre. The announced effort of the authors to make a literal rendering at the expense of elegance is successful if the crudity of the verse be a criterion. This was the first book published in the Thirteen Colonies.

The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in British North America.

The book is a Psalter, first printed in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Psalms in it are metrical translations into English. The translations are not particularly polished or poetic, and none have remained in use, although some of the tunes to which they were sung have survived (for instance, "Old 100th.") However its production, a mere 20 years after the Pilgrim Fathers arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, represents a considerable achievement. It went through several editions and remained in use for well over a century.

History

The early residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them several books of psalms: the Ainsworth Psalter (1612), compiled by Henry Ainsworth for use by Puritan "separatists" in Holland; the Ravenscroft Psalter (1621); and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter (1562, of which there were several editions). Evidently they were dissatisfied with the translations from Hebrew in these several psalters, and wished for some that were closer to the original. They hired "thirty pious and learned Ministers", including Richard Mather and John Eliot, to undertake a new translation, which they presented here. The tunes to be sung to the new translations were the familiar ones from their existing psalters.

The first edition of the Bay Psalm Book to include music was the ninth edition, of 1698, which included tunes from John Playford's A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London, 1654).

Title page

The title page of the first edition of 1640 reads:

The Whole Booke of Psalmes
Faithfully
TRANSLATED into ENGLISH
Metre.
Whereunto is prefixed a discourse
declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also
the necessity of the heavenly Ordinance
of singing Scripture Psalmes in
the Churches of God.

Cambridge, Mass. Stephen Day
Imprinted, 1640

Extant copies

Eleven copies of the first edition of the Bay Psalm Book are known still to exist. One of them is in the Library of Congress, one is owned by Yale University, one by Brown University, one by the American Antiquarian Society, one by the Rosenbach Museum & Library and two, housed in the Rare Book Collection at the Boston Public Library, are owned by Old South Church in Boston.

The discovery of a twelfth complete copy was one of the plot points in David Baldacci's 2006 thriller novel, The Collectors

Notes

See also

• Metrical psalter

References

• Graham, Fred Kimball (2004) "With One Heart and One Voice: A Core Repertory of Hymn Tunes Published for Use in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, 1808-1878. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

External links

• A digital facsimile of the original 1640 edition.
• A brief account of the book and the texts of some of the psalms from it
• The preface to the book
• Picture of the title page