The Old Testament in Scots

SCOTS as used today is a language bereft of its high-register vocabulary and adulterated with an alien standard, a reflection of the extraordinary pressure exercised on our old Lowland tongue by a series of events more arbitrary than predestined.

One element in the decline of Scots was the lack of a vernacular Bible. The Presbyterian reformers, with their thoughts more on their country's evangelical glory than its worldly fame, didn't just take the English one already to hand but introduced a law obliging better-off families to have a copy in the house.

Today we aim to change all that, in a plain version not for specialists but for ordinary readers, and in single volumes.

Though it may be but the end of an old song, the language can still move and delight readers. The two authors of this little book hope that the same can be said of the text contained within and that, at a few firesides for a while yet, the words of the patriarchs can ring out in the plain speech of our fathers.