‘The Righteous Shall Be Punished’: The Biography of a Biblical Misprint

ABSTRACT Misprints in early English bibles are as frequent as they are amusing, yet scholars have paid little attention to the most widespread of all. From its 1548 inception all the way to 1662, the psalter for use with the Book of Common Prayer rendered Psalm 37:29 ‘The righteous shall be punished’ in place of ‘The unrighteous’. While the printers of the so‐called ‘Wicked Bible’ were fined for mistakenly printing ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’ (with missing negation) in a single 1631 edition, the punishment of the righteous appeared in hundreds of Prayer Book Psalters, brought out by dozens of printers, and was itself unpunished. It became so familiar that seventeenth‐century theologians even based arguments on the righteous's undeserved predicament. The present essay tells the story of this extraordinarily long‐lived misprint, describing the print shop accidents that led such a theologically alarming forecast to become accepted Church of England usage. It traces reader responses to the corrupt passage through both handwritten marginalia and printed citations and presents new evidence that printers suspected the error long before its 1662 correction. More than just amusing, ‘The righteous shall be punished’ issues a warning against allowing the accidents of a novel medium to transform error into conviction.