Of the King James Version, editors Robert Alter and Frank Kermode in The Literary Guide to the Bible write, “Here is a miscellany of documents containing ancient stories, poems, laws, prophecies, which most of us cannot even read in the original languages, and which are a best, if we are English speakers, in an English that was already archaic when the King James (or “Authorized”) Version was published in 1611, and may now often seem distant and exotic: ‘that old tongue,’ as Edmund Wilson one vividly expressed it, ‘with its clang and flavor.’ Yet, as Wilson went on to say, ‘we have been living with it all our lives.’ In short, the language as well as the message it conveys symbolizes for us a past, strange and yet familiar, which we feel we somehow must understand if we are to understand ourselves.”
Later in the General Introduction we read, “We have as a rule used the King James Version in translation, and our reasons for doing so must be obvious: it is the version most English readers associate with the literary qualities of the Bible, and it is still arguably the version that best preserves the literary effects of the original languages.”
Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1, 7.
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