Is it a translation issue, or a characteristic of Greek or Aramaic? A ritualized manner of speech? Or was it just the way people wrote at the time?

The Python sketch is comedy, juxtaposing the grandiose language with phrasing like "right out" and the use of a hand grenade to kill a rabbit, but it is true that The Bible is a bit strange. It is not translated like ancient languages ordinarily are. All of the factors you've identified have some role to play, but one of the biggest factors is translation. Of course, the characteristics of ancient languages compared to our own, the way people wrote at the time of the original composition (and at the time of early translations into other languages), and a desire to maintain the gravitas of the gospels by creating/preserving a grandiose style all factor into that translation. But some of The Bible's linguistic weirdness is actually pretty straightforward to explain. Translators always have to find a balance between making a text readable in English and preserving the original author's intent. That gets complicated when we have to translate grammar that is rarely used in English and makes the translation read strangely.

O Lord - The Vocative Case

The Bible, and many pre-modern texts, contain something called the vocative case. It was a ubiquitous part of Latin and Greek, and you'll find it all the time in speeches and poems from antiquity. Take, for example, Cicero's first speech against the senator Cataline:

When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?... You ought, O Catiline, long ago to have been led to execution by command of the consul. That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head.

Modern English doesn't have grammatical cases, as they have been replaced by auxiliary words and pronouns like "of" [Note: as u/LegalAction has pointed out, we actually still use them very occasionally in some of our pronouns - the difference between "who" and "whose"]. Grammatical cases are quite hard to explain to people who only speak English, but they were modifications made to a word in order to signal its relation to other words in the sentence. One case was the nominative, which identified the primary object of the sentence. Another was the genitive, which indicated possession. The one that results in a lot of the weird Bible speak is the vocative case, which is used to address someone (or something), usually dramatically. The "O [insert noun here]" formulation is, to my knowledge, the only way to preserve the use of the vocative case, and has been used that way for hundreds of years. Unlike other cases, which have been replaced by the use of auxiliary words, English has essentially expunged the vocative and its not something we think about when writing. Translators have always had to strike a balance between preserving the intent of the original author and making it readable in the new language, and things like "O Lord" rather than just "Lord" is the most noticeable example of this. "O Lord" is weird to read, but it sounds dramatic and is a method of addressing. It works as vocative. It is readable and preserves the original authorial intent that God be addressed dramatically. That aspect of the weirdness is just translators trying to adapt grammar that no longer exists in English so that it can be understood.

Four shalt thou not count - The Bible Should Sound Old

This is where some of the other factors come into it. Were we doing a regular translation of normal Latin or Greek, stuff like "thou shalt" would not be in there. We would simply write "you shall", because that's what it means in modern English. But the most influential edition of The Bible in English isn't modern! It's the King James Bible, which was published in 1611, and re-edited in 1769. That 1769 version is probably the most printed book in history. But also, why translate The Bible? It was to be used in church services, for solemn and dignified services, so it was translated in such a way as to be conducive to that. The translators of that time wanted The Bible to sound slightly archaic to reflect its age - it's an old book so it should sound old. So this aspect of The Bible's linguistic weirdness is a product of the last two factors you mentioned. In part, it is a ritualized manner of speech - it was deliberately translated this way in the 17th and 18th centuries to be conducive to viewing The Bible as an old and dignified text and preserving its mystique and gravitas during church services. The translators did that by adopting language that was slightly out of date at the time of the translation. People were using language like "hath" and "thou" a lot less in the 17th century, but that's what made it appealing for the translators of King James who wanted it to sound a bit old fashioned. And because the King James Bible is one of the most influential translations of a work ever done, we continue to associate biblical speech with this 17th century translation that uses 16th century language to sound old to 17th century readers.

There is an upper limit to how well that effect will work, and it is generally accepted that the King James Bible is not all that readable to modern audiences. Even at the time there were problems. In its effort to evoke the age of The Bible, the 1611 version did not use the letter J. J was relatively new as a letter, so its use was probably seen as a risk to the archaicness of The Bible. Although it had been used here and there for much of the later Middle Ages, it became mainstream in the middle of the 16th century. This made it new enough that the translators of the King James Bible did not want to use it, but even by the 1620s it was clear that it needed the letter J to be readable in 17th century English, so they released a new version in 1629, now with the letter J! So although more recent translations of The Bible have started to move away from this archaic language for the sake of readability, the use of formulations like "O lord" and "thou shalt" are so strongly associated with biblical speech thanks to the King James Bible that we still use them. Likewise, phrases like "they did feast" rather than "they feasted" play a role in making it sound old. Sometimes that's just the literal translation of what the original says, however.

Those two factors - trying to cram the vocative case into English and trying to make The Bible sound old - explain most of it.

It depends on what you're referring to.

The "thees", "thous", and other antique word choices, are a product of the King James Version of the Bible, an English translation made in the 1600s. The Hebrew/Greek could just as easily be translated using modern English words.

But in general, the Bible's narrative and poetry is very different from modern Western narrative and poetry. I'll focus on Old Testament (Hebrew Bible's) narrative, as that's closest to the Monty Python example.

Ways in which the Hebrew Bible's narrative differs from modern narrative includes:

1. A seemingly absurd focus and repetition on certain facts (In the example above, "Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three."; in the Bible, see Gen. 1:27, Exodus 7:14-21)

2. A lack of descriptors (rarely do you find physical appearances or character traits described, unless it's important to the story, eg in Judges 3:17. The description of the serpent as "cunning" in Gen. 3:1 is an extremely rare instance of receiving characterization of anyone, especially prior to dialogue)

3. The Bible's "bias" towards expressing anything through dialogue whenever possible, even when not factual (eg 2 Sam 2:1 summarizes David's consultation of the divinatory Urim and Thummim with a short, simple sequence of dialogue (Alter, p86))

4. The Bible has an omniscient, and frequently anonymous, narrator who knows everything that's happening (Gen. 3:1; also see Esther 9:1-10, where the narrator says things happening in more than one location at once) (see Sternberg chs 1 and 3)

Some of the above is simply a result of stylistic preferences of the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern literature, especially number 2 and 3. But several are functional.

For example, while us moderns typically encounter the Bible through written word, traditionally the Bible would be encountered through oral tradition, especially spoken aloud to groups. In such a setting, repetition of important plot elements would be helpful; when in a large audience, it'd be possible to miss a detail, but if the detail is repeated often, it not only emphasizes it's importance, but makes it more likely to be heard, as in Exod. 7:14-21. However, sometimes the repetition is poetic, as in Gen. 1:27 (many Bibles will have indentation indicating that this section is poetry).

Another quirk is that, "Omniscience in modern narrative attends and signals functionality, while in the ancient tradition it not only accommodates but also guarantees authenticity" (Sternberg, p34). This is a case where different cultures value different things - in the biblical setting, having an omniscient narrator makes the narrative account sound more true, serving "the purpose of staging and glorifying an omniscient God" (Sternberg, p89).

There is much more that could be said of course. The sources used above were Robert Alter's "The Art of Biblical Narrative" revised edition, and Meir Sternberg's "The Poetics of Biblical Narrative." These two scholars are Jewish and thus focus their work on the Hebrew Bible. For more on Hebrew poetry, see Alter's "The Art of Biblical Poetry." I am pursuing a Masters in Theology and can read Hebrew, and can vouch for many of the things they express. (I am less well read on the New Testament; however, keep in mind that only the Gospels and Acts are narrative. As a student of the Bible I can say that their narrative style is very similar to that of the Hebrew Bible. The rest of the New Testament is all letters to different churches, even Revelation, despite its apocalyptic genre.)

Great question! The short answer is that it's really everything you mention, but I'll explain in a bit more detail how this all works.

1: The Holy And-grenade

One of the most famous (or notorious) quirks of biblical texts is that so many sentences start with 'and'. The reason for this is a grammatical construction in Hebrew called the vav-consecutive, which is a very common feature of what Hendel and Joosten (2018) call Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH), which was in use until the 6th-ish century BCE. Normally, you attach the letter vav (or waw - it's like a German w) as a prefix to any word to mean 'and': zakhar wu-nqevah 'male and female'. But in CBH, when you prefix a verb like that, the meaning changes slightly more than just adding 'and'; it's basically a marker that you're in a narrative style and some tale is being told here.

You can compare it to how people use the 'historical present' in English: "So I walk up to the guy and tell him his beard is lush." Even though the verbs 'walk', 'tell', and 'is' are in the present tense, we understand from the context that this event took place in the past. So yes, technically the Hebrew has the word 'and' in vav-consecutive verbs, but it's often more intuitively rendered as 'then' or 'so', or even left out entirely in a modern rendering of the text. In other words, it'd be totally reasonable to render

And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light.

as

Then God said: 'Let there be light', and there was light.

This actually touches on a bit of translation theory that ties in with this question. Broadly speaking, there are two extreme possibilities when rendering a text from one language into another. You can translate it word for word, literally as it's written, keeping every bit as close to the original language as possible - but then you end up with a super clunky text that might not quite be comprehensible. The other extreme is rendering the text in ways that the translation's readers would most intuitively understand - but the risk of that is that the translation gets further and further away from the original, so you can wonder whether you're really reading the same text still. We see this already in the earliest Bible translations (the Septuagint or LXX, the Greek translations), where some versions take the latter approach and opt for something that flows better in Greek, and others (most notoriously the kaige version) that try to render everything as close to the Hebrew as possible. (There are also cases where the LXX translators clearly had no idea what the Hebrew was supposed to mean, so they just changed the text to something they thought might make sense, but that's another story.)

The first translations of the Bible into English took a pretty balanced approach; Tyndale's translations actually got him into trouble with the Church that led to his execution for heresy, by choosing particular words that were seen to be anti-Catholic (e.g. rendering Greek ekklesia as 'assembly' rather than the Church's preferred 'church'). The King James Bible on the whole rejected too literal a rendering, which partially led to its status not only as the 'proper' English version (which it enjoys in certain circles to this day) but also to its language becoming an exemplar for high-status texts. Because it endured so long and was changed relatively minimally (spelling updates as well as some word choice changes) over the centuries, some of its stylistic features that have since fallen out of common usage (e.g. the thou/you split for informal/formal, and the -th verb ending like 'giveth') are now strongly associated with this kind of antique, wordy writing. Of course, at the time, their writing style wasn't particularly unusual - it's just that the passage of time has made it seem more unusual to a modern reader. So that's where you get some of that 'olde English' writing style - but wait, there's more!

2: Skip a bit, brother

One of the things the Bible really likes to do is be extremely specific about things. Why it does this is another (very big) question, but there are plenty of examples in the Book of Numbers (e.g. 3:36). The book of Leviticus, too, has tons of this; have a look at this prescription from Lev 14:12-18:

“Then the priest is to take one of the male lambs and offer it as a guilt offering, along with the log of oil; he shall wave them before the Lord as a wave offering. He is to slaughter the lamb in the sanctuary area where the sin offering d and the burnt offering are slaughtered. Like the sin offering, the guilt offering belongs to the priest; it is most holy. The priest is to take some of the blood of the guilt offering and put it on the lobe of the right ear of the one to be cleansed, on the thumb of their right hand and on the big toe of their right foot. The priest shall then take some of the log of oil, pour it in the palm of his own left hand, dip his right forefinger into the oil in his palm, and with his finger sprinkle some of it before the Lord seven times. The priest is to put some of the oil remaining in his palm on the lobe of the right ear of the one to be cleansed, on the thumb of their right hand and on the big toe of their right foot, on top of the blood of the guilt offering. The rest of the oil in his palm the priest shall put on the head of the one to be cleansed and make atonement for them before the Lord.

Okay, why not.

But this is not a uniquely biblical phenomenon: there are plenty of exhaustive (and exhausting) catalogues of stuff in other ancient Near Eastern texts. The best examples of these are the Neo-Assyrian Empire's royal inscriptions, where I'll just pull a bit from the description of Sennacherib's first campaign, during which he looted his arch-enemy Babylon:

With a rejoicing heart and a radiant face, I rushed to Babylon and entered the palace of Marduk-apla-iddina (II) (Merodach-baladan) to take charge of the possessions and property therein. I opened his treasury and brought out gold, silver, gold (and) silver utensils, precious stones, beds, armchairs, a processional carriage, royal paraphernalia of his with gold (and) silver mountings, all kinds of possessions (and) property without number, a substantial treasure, (together with) his wife, his palace women, female stewards, eunuchs, courtiers, attendants, male singers, female singers, palace servants who cheered up his princely mind, all of the craftsmen, as many as there were, (and) his palace attendants, and I counted (them) as booty.

The purpose here, which the bit from Monty Python is lampooning, is to indicate the scope of the operation: by listing every single bit of loot, the text drives home the point of the king's success. In the Bible, you'll often find them as prescriptive lists in the context of particular rituals (as in the Numbers verse I cited), so it's not just boasting about quantities there, but also providing guidelines for future generations on how to conduct certain tasks!

Answer me these questions three...

So what's up with the counting to three? Well, there's no strict equivalence to this in the Bible. Three is, of course, a significant number for Christians, representing the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), which of course wasn't intended to be there in the (Jewish) Hebrew Bible. Seven is actually more important, representing holiness. But three is a significant number for other reasons: things often appear in threes (Noah's sons, the items in the Ark of the Covenant, the doors of Solomon's palace, David bowing to Jonathan, three annuals feasts... three sections to an AskHistorians answer!). In addition to this, similarly to the example above of odd specificity of items, some texts will be extremely specific with their use of numbers. We find this in the book of Numbers, of course, where the lists of members of each tribe, and how many men and women and children and goats (and so on) they had, doesn't make for tremendously engaging reading:

On the east, toward the sunrise, the divisions of the camp of Judah are to encamp under their standard. The leader of the people of Judah is Nahshon son of Amminadab. His division numbers 74,600. The tribe of Issachar will camp next to them. The leader of the people of Issachar is Nethanel son of Zuar. His division numbers 54,400. The tribe of Zebulun will be next. The leader of the people of Zebulun is Eliab son of Helon. His division numbers 57,400. All the men assigned to the camp of Judah, according to their divisions, number 186,400. They will set out first.

Anyway, I hope that helps make some sense of this all! Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

There’s a lot to the Bible and it was written over a fairly long period of time.

I don’t know about all of it, but I have translated a fair bit of the Koinē Greek bible. I believe the bits I translated were originally in Greek, not translated from Aramaic. It was also New Testament.

My experience in translating Koinē in general is that it’s very easy, relative to like Homeric Greek. The word choice is not as arcane, the word order is not all over the place (because you can do that in Greek and generally in case-based languages), and a number of additional bits like that. Basically, it felt like English (L1 English speaker) much more than Homeric Greek.

Your question is - is the Bible written like the Pythons make it out, if so, why?

My experience translating from Koine to English, the Bible is not like that. But let’s consider why it would or wouldn’t be. First off - when we look at text like what you shared from the pythons, what do we see? We see formulae for addressing a superior, and we see very formal speech. The formulae are the lists - a very common thing in old texts wishing they were older than they are. The catalogue of ships in the Iliad, for example. Not all lists are created equal, and this list is actually a little weird because it doesn’t mention the quantities of each delicacy the people consumed. The next list is the counting - I haven’t seen that kind of counting outside of translating classical period comedies. Most of the time people knew how to count. All this is wrapped up in a supplication to the lord who did grin. Oftentimes when raising something in supplication, one would be on their knees, so “on high” indicates that they’re probably standing, and occupying a position of power and authority from which to make the supplication. Not totally atypical, but not altogether common either. If we go all the way back to Homer again, the method of supplication was to be on one’s knees and hug the legs with one arm and grasp their chin in the other. How much that actually happened is gonna be hard to tell but we have evidence in writing and in vases that it did.

Going back to the enumeration for a moment - the bit from the Pythons is a comedy - I think it’d suck the comedy out by putting quantities of each item consumed, but doing so would make more sense from a certain angle. But why would it be done at all? Writing down what one sacrifices or is consumed at a religious event happens a lot, along with who provides it, etc. Gotta get in with the big peeps. However, if we look at Homer, this looks like “hekatombs” of cattle getting sacrificed regularly. No way did they have that much spare - it’s metaphorical for “a lot.” Same way that the Greeks largely stopped counting past 10,000, a “myriad” (μυριάδες). I think my Greek keyboard autocorrected to modern Greek. Some of the quantities are as formulaic as anything. So it’s kind of a mix between there being an actual value to the quantifying of how much was provided or consumed and a symbolic one. For the pythons, no value because it didn’t serve the comedy or flow or whatever - they’re comedic geniuses, not passing judgement.

So then I feel like we wrap up with translation. If you’ve ever read the King James translation, it’s not as accurate of a translation as we’d use today perhaps. This is because it was wrapped up in the courtly language of the time for a courtly literate audience. Every translation is going to be a product of the people that translate it and their linguistic context. Language tends to become more irregular and less structured over time. Two great examples are Greek and English. Greek used to have a Dual form that was specifically for talking about 2 things. That’s very far gone. The number of cases used in nouns today in Greek is different than what it was in Homeric Greek or classical, and the prepositions they’re used with has changed as well. Both are less than latin which also had the ablative. The number of verb tenses actively used in conversation is also lesser, with the aorist consuming several different past tenses in practice. The practice of perfect passive participles is not as common, etc. So language changes and largely simplifies over time. (EDIT: as a commenter below points out, this is over generalized and applies specifically to Indo-European languages, namely Greek and English. Languages can gain structure over time and lose both.)

All in all, this is probably more an example of ritualized speech that fit the gravitas of the context, but was transformed to be comedic.

A lifetime ago, when I was an undergrad, I actually used this clip as an illustration of the incredible staying power of the King James version. The Arthur legend is set about a millennium before the King James Bible was written, so there’s no reason why the Bible ought to sound “King Jamesey” in Arthurian times… but the Pythons understood that people just think of that translation as “what the Bible sounds like.”

And they’re right… even those of us who know better do often think of the King James version as “what the Bible sounds like” with interesting knock-on effects ranging from The Holy Hand Grenade to Darth Vader’s “What is thy bidding” to the Book of Mormon’s style.

So part of the humor simply comes from the juxtaposition of the King James style with the silliness of the dialogue. But… part of it does in fact come from imitations of the actual Biblical text (and the nuances of ancient Hebrew), particularly in the matter of repetition.

“...raised the hand grenade up on high...”

This specific case comes from the Hebrew word(s) “al” (עַל). Related to the Hebrew word “alah” (to go up), this word most often is just the preposition “on” (as in English, it includes both literal and metaphorical nuances, such as the meaning “concerning” as in “a book on history.”) As a substantive, it can mean “high.” KJV translators of, say, 2 Sam 23:1 therefore translated the phrase עָ֔ל הֻ֣קַם as “raised up on high,” blending the two senses of the word. Modern translations tend to render it somewhat differently, from the CEB’s sensible “raised high” to the
NRSV’s “exalted” (a rendering that takes after the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Bible).

But… apart from the specifics of that case, the reason this line (and the related joke “The Lord spake, saying”) works is that it echoes a construction common in Hebrew where a term is intensified with a similar term. This can be very direct, as in the case of what’s called the “cognate accusative”-- when the object of a verb shares a root with the verb itself: e.g. “I dreamed a dream,” “I fought the fight.” Often, however, the parallel is rougher than that. Think of English language “legal doublets” for common examples of this sort of thing. In English, you’ll also find examples of this in the way that politicians or public relations managers sometimes speak, particularly when denouncing something. “wicked, immoral, and reprehensible” or whatever. You find a similar concern in “three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.”

But there’s one last thing that makes people think of the Bible as repetitive. And that is that some of the Bible’s most famous passages are the result of redactors combining different traditions into one narrative. In some cases, they preserve sentences that say nearly identical things… and in others, sentences that are flat contradictions of one another. Take the flood story of Genesis 6-8. Nearly the entire story is doubled. Both stories contain similar overall outlines, but they differ in details such as how many animals come aboard the ark, how Noah thanks God, what bird Noah sends out, and what exactly God’s promise is at the end of the story. (I quickly found this layman’s comparison of the stories online). And the Bible has a lot of this. There are two versions of the 10 Commandments, two creation stories, two accounts of David meeting Saul, two versions of the exodus sea-crossing story, and many more besides. Scholars love this sort of thing… we can learn a lot more from a text that preserves multiple sources than one which smooths everything out.

Tl;dr

1. The King James Bible has an enduring cultural impression on English speakers;

2. Specific translation decisions can be the cause of some stilted speech;

3. Repetition of similar or even related words is sometimes a stylistic feature in Hebrew (and Greek) texts for purposes of nuance or emphasis;

4. The Hebrew Bible (and for that matter the four gospels) involve many cases of the same story told more than once, sometimes directly interwoven, preserving multiple ancient sources.

Follow up question:

I've heard it claimed in a few places that one reason for the frequency with which lists appear in the bible (a stylistic feature prominent enough to be mentioned in most of the replies here) is because the principle use of writing at the time the Hebrew Bible was being compiled was making list and that convention left a pronounced stylistic mark on the Bible as we know it.

Is this claim credible, plausible, purely speculative?