Wicked Bible - Wikipedia

The Wicked Bible, sometimes called the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners' Bible, is an edition of the Bible published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:14, the word "not" was omitted from the sentence "Thou shalt not commit adultery," causing the verse to instead read "Thou shalt commit adultery."

Historically, the omission of "not" was considered quite a common mistake.[citation needed ] Until 2004, for example, the style guide of the Associated Press advised using "innocent" instead of "not guilty" to describe acquittals, so as to prevent this eventuality.[1]

There are two significant errors in the Wicked Bible. The first error is the omission of the word "not" in the sentence "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14), thus changing the sentence into "Thou shalt commit adultery". The second error appears in Deuteronomy 5, where the word "greatness" was reportedly misprinted as "great-asse", leading to a sentence reading: "Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse".[2][3] The existence of this second mistake is attested as early as 1886, in the Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, which gives the Rawlinson MS, A128 in the Bodleian Library as the source of the claim.[4] Gordon Campbell notes that there are no surviving copies of the book that contain the second error ("great-asse"), but that in three of the surviving copies there is an inkblot positioned where the missing "n" would be, suggesting such a mistake may have been covered up in these copies. Campbell also highlights the fact that, at the time of the Wicked Bible's publication, the word "asse" only had the sense of "donkey".[5]

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