The Bay Psalm Book (1640)

The Bay Psalm Book is a translation of the whole Book of Psalms into English verse for singing, first printed in 1640 in Cambridge, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was the first book printed in British North America. Its full title is The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. About 1,700 copies of the first edition were printed, and eleven are known to survive. One sold at auction in 2013 for 14.2 million US dollars.

This page gives the book's history from published sources, listed at the foot of the page. The psalms themselves, in the World English Bible and the King James Version, each have their own page on this site.

The colonists of Massachusetts Bay already had psalm books. They had brought the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter of 1562, the Ainsworth Psalter of 1612 and the Ravenscroft Psalter of 1621. They were not satisfied with how these translated the psalms from Hebrew, and wanted versions closer to the original. The aim was a book of psalms in English metre, lines with a regular count and rhyme, so that a congregation could sing them to known tunes. The result covered the whole book, all 150 psalms, which is why the title calls it the whole book of psalms.

No single person wrote it. The colonists hired a group described as "thirty pious and learned Ministers" to make the translation. The ministers named among them include Richard Mather and John Eliot. The book was printed at the first press in the colonies, in Cambridge. Stephen Daye ran that press and is remembered as the first printer in colonial America. He worked under contract to the Reverend Joseph Glover, who died on the voyage from England. Glover's widow, Elizabeth Glover, then owned the press and was its publisher until her death in 1643.

The Bay Psalm Book's Psalm 23 begins, "The Lord to me a shepherd is, want therefore shall not I." Set beside the King James Version, "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want," it shows what the translators were doing. The words and order are bent to fit a regular beat and a rhyme, so that the psalm can be sung line by line. The same is true of every psalm in the book. The first edition printed no music. The ninth edition of 1698 was the first to print notated music, with 13 tunes taken from the works of John Playford. The book went through several editions and stayed in use for well over a century.

About 1,700 copies of the first edition were printed in 1640. Eleven are known to survive, and only five of those are complete. In November 2013 one copy sold at Sotheby's for 14.2 million US dollars. The seller was Old South Church in Boston, and the buyer was the financier David Rubenstein. The other surviving copies are held by libraries and institutions, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Yale's Beinecke Library, Harvard's Houghton Library and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.