The original punctuation

In George Eliot's Middlemarch Mrs Cadwallader tartly remarks of the ageing scholar Casaubon that when a drop of his blood was placed under a magnifying-glass ‘it was all semi-colons and parentheses’ (chapter 8). Perhaps this suggests his contorted prose, but the association of punctuation with the lifeless extremes of futile scholarship is inescapable. I suspect that a full study of the punctuation of the KJB would take a lifetime, and, like Casaubon's flawed ‘Key to all Mythologies’, be frustrated by an early grave. I will therefore deal only briefly with the history before surveying the problems punctuation raises and the solutions adopted in the new edition.

This is not to say that punctuation does not matter: of course it does. The greatest ever work of punctuation — or pointing — was done by the Masoretic scholars on the OT. They devised a way of marking the unpunctuated, consonantal Hebrew words so that their knowledge of that text's traditional sound and sense was recorded without any change being made to the sacred text itself. Faithful to their belief in its inviolability, neither a jot nor a tittle of the text was changed, yet their religion and its language were preserved.

We may use this reminder of Masoretic pointing to suggest a larger understanding of punctuation than our usual sense that it is the application of punctuation marks to a piece of writing.