Jun 7, 20222 min read

The Complete 1599 Geneva Audio Bible - With No Commercial Interruptions!

Updated: Dec 8, 2022

This was the one that was brought over on The Mayflower and with No Commercial Interruptions! It's great to listen to while working and I personally like to fall asleep listening to it. You can never get too much of The Word! It's also a very good translation and I've not run across much that I didn't like about it.

"The Geneva Bible is one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into English, preceding the King James Version by 51 years. It was the primary Bible of 16th-century English Protestantism and was used by William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, John Donne, and others. It was one of the Bibles taken to America on the Mayflower. (Pilgrim Hall Museum has collected several Bibles of Mayflower passengers.) The Geneva Bible was used by many English Dissenters, and it was still respected by Oliver Cromwell's soldiers at the time of the English Civil War, in the booklet The Souldiers Pocket Bible.

This version of the Bible is significant because, for the first time, a mechanically printed, mass-produced Bible was made available directly to the general public which came with a variety of scriptural study guides and aids (collectively called an apparatus), which included verse citations that allow the reader to cross-reference one verse with numerous relevant verses in the rest of the Bible, introductions to each book of the Bible that acted to summarize all of the material that each book would cover, maps, tables, woodcut illustrations and indices.

Because the language of the Geneva Bible was more forceful and vigorous, most readers strongly preferred this version to the Great Bible. In the words of Cleland Boyd McAfee, "it drove the Great Bible off the field by sheer power of excellence".

Like most English translations of the time, the Geneva Bible was translated from scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures that comprise the Old Testament. The English rendering was substantially based on the earlier translations by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale (the Genevan Bible relies significantly upon Tyndale). However, the Geneva Bible was the first English version in which all of the Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew."