Q: Merriam-Webster says “even so” means “nevertheless” or “in spite of that.” I’m puzzled by its use in this passage from the King James Version: “Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”
A: Although the phrase “even so” means “nevertheless” or “in spite of that” today, it has had several other senses that are now considered archaic.
When the phrase showed up in Old English as efne swa, perhaps as far back as 1,200 years ago, it meant “in the very same way; likewise, similarly,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest OED citation is from Christ I, a collection of anonymous poems about the coming of Christ:
“Þu eart þæt wealldor, þurh þe waldend frea / æne on þas eorðan ut siðade, / ond efne swa þec gemette, meahtum gehrodene, / clæne ond gecorene, Crist ælmihtig” (“You are the door in the wall; through you the all-wielding Lord / only once journeyed out into this world, / and even so [in that way] he found you, adorned with powers, / chaste and chosen, Almighty Christ”).
The 12 poems of Christ I are in The Exeter Book, a 10th-century collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. In Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group (1949), the Swedish scholar Claes Schaar suggests that Christ I may have been written around 800 AD, though not, as some have speculated, by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf.
In Middle English, according to OED citations, “even so” came to be an intensifier “expressing emphatic agreement: ‘exactly so,’ ‘yes indeed.’ ” The dictionary’s first example is from an early 15th-century sermon:
“For lik as oure princes and lordes spoyleth and robbeþ þer suggettus … euen so God suffreþ þe ethen princes to robb and spoile oure lordes” (“For like as our princes and lords despoil and rob their subjects … even so [exactly so] God allows the heathen princes to rob and despoil our lords”). From a sermon written circa 1415 and collected in Middle English Sermons (1940), by Woodburn O. Ross.
In the passage you cite from Revelation 1:7 in the King James Version (written from 1604 to 1611), “even so” is used in the “exactly so” or “yes indeed” sense:
“Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”
The OED cites another example from the King James Version. Here “even so” is used in its “similarly” sense: “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18).
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