This highly original study explores how translators from Wyclif, Tyndale and Coverdale to the scholars who produced the Geneva, Bishops' and King James Bibles grappled with the problem of converting the Hebrew terms used to describe social relations in the Old Testament into vernacular equivalents which contemporary English men and women could understand. Using her scholarly grasp of Hebrew, the opportunities provided by the new database of ‘The Bible in English’ (Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, 2009) to calculate the frequency with which certain words were used in succeeding translations, and her command of the recent literature on English social history, Naomi Tadmor traces four sea changes: from the Hebrew ‘love thy friend’ or ‘fellow man’ to the English ‘love thy neighbour’; from Hebrew concepts of marriage and sexual relations to Christian concepts of monogamy and ‘forbidden degrees’; from Hebrew slave to English ‘servant’; and from the many Hebrew terms used to designate notions of office and rule to the English translators' stress on ‘princes’ and ‘lords’. The translators did not work in a vacuum: there were the Greek and Latin equivalents of the Old Testament and the commentaries of the early Church and the Middle Ages, as well as the shifting legal and social usages of English words from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Tadmor argues that the ‘slippages’ in translation that she has identified were gradual, and a mixture of the deliberate – to bring scriptural texts into line with current local practice – and the unavoidable – due to the lack of alternative idioms in the English vernacular. Those translators operating from the 1550s to 1611 had opportunities to reverse the trend to Anglicisation by using terms more faithful to the original, but opted not to take them, so that the semantic shifts were consolidated and ‘canonised’ in the King James Bible. The case for these shifts is persuasively argued, though we could have been told more of the methodology used in the computer searches, and how much allowance was made for the contexts of the ‘Anglicised’ usages that they threw up. The attempt to demonstrate the wider dissemination of these terms, through the rapid expansion of the numbers of copies of the Bible in circulation, and through catechising, homilies, godly living handbooks and treatises, is also on the whole convincing, though more could perhaps have been made of the frequent oral repetition of many of the key phrases through the official liturgy and lectionary. But it is the attempts to link the changes in scriptural terminology to changes in social attitudes and political relations in early modern England which are most problematic. Ownership of a Bible did not lead to a standard way of reading it, let alone the same conclusions being drawn; and no matter how many literary and legal sources are deployed to gauge possible interactions between shifting translations and changing attitudes, we are going to need far more studies of how individual clergy and lay people reacted than a short monograph can provide. Tadmor's book provides essential reading on the changes in translation, and throws down a gauntlet on the reasons for and impact of those changes.