The first complete Bible in Finnish. Before it there was Mikael Agricola's New Testament of 1548 and pieces of the Old published in the 1550s; after it there was a whole Bible in a language that had barely been written down. Four scholars did the work between 1638 and 1641 — Eskil Petraeus, Martinus Stodius, Henricus Hoffman and Gregorius Matthaei — under Isaacus Rothovius, Bishop of Turku, who pushed the project through. Finland was part of Sweden, and the volume appeared in 1642 under the patronage of Queen Christina. An attempt had been made a generation earlier: a translation committee was appointed in 1602, probably under Ericus Erici Sorolainen, Bishop of Turku. It appears to have produced drafts but never assembled them into a Bible, and what became of them is largely lost — though the work is thought to have told on the 1642 translation.
They translated from the Hebrew and the Greek with Luther's German beside them. The Swedish Bible of Gustav Vasa was the other book on the table; it is not in this corpus, so the chain here records the Luther — and, beside him, Agricola's Finnish of 1548, the base text the committee was revising. The 1642 Biblia's larger effect was on Finnish itself. A language with almost no written prose acquired, in one volume, a vocabulary and a cadence for everything from law to lament — and every later Finnish Bible is a revision or a successor of it rather than a fresh start.
In this reader the 1642 sits between two Finnish rungs. Three rungs below Kirkkoraamattu 1933/38, beneath Biblia 1776, this edition appears; and beneath it two parents side by side — Agricola's Finnish of 1548, the base the committee revised, and Luther's German of 1545, open on the table. One rung further down and the chain has left Finnish for good. The text here comes from the Kotus VKS corpus of Old Literary Finnish, which is why the spelling you see — “tulcon walkeus” — is the 1642 printing's own and not modernised.