My Thoughts on the KJV

Harold Camping can supply you with some excellent resources
... but you'd better act fast.

Betcha don't know how to say it!

In medicine we use a stethoscope to listen for a bruit following various procedures.

Pronounce it "brew-ee"

Rob

 

I love the KJV, but one thing that bothers me is how people refer to Eve as "help meet" as if it were one word. Meet means "suitable". Eve was a helper suitable for Adam, not a "helpmeet".

 

Many people use it as one word and others use it as two. It's an older form of helpmate.

The modern versions clarify the meaning better:

NIV : I will make a helper suitable for him.
ESV : I will make a helper fit for him.
GW : I will make a helper who is right for him.
NLT : I will make a companion who will help him.

The HCSB's rendering is incorrect I think : I will make a helper who is like him.

 

Well stated, esp. "the worst enemies the KJV has are some KJVO'ers."

 

Anyone can 'look it up.' My point is why should we have to use a Bible that is so foreign that we have to read it dictionary in hand? Does God not want His word in the language of His people?

 

1 Corinthians 11:8-12

King James Version (KJV)



8For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man.
9Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.
10For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.
11Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. 12For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.


We are equal spiritually, but the flesh is not equal and was not intended to be equal.

Debbie Mc

 

I know there are books you can refer to, and websites, in order to discover what the archaic words and phrases mean, but you had said:

"Yes, there are a few outdated words, but even my granddaughter can figure out what they mean without a dictionary."
​

OK, so you might say that The King James Bible Companion isn't a dictionary. Even so, looking up a word or phrase in a Chick Publication doesn't really qualify as "figuring out" what the word or phrase means.

I am certainly not against the KJV, but I cannot see how the archaic phrases and words can be considered more accurate. In fact I would say the opposite, because the archaic words may mean something today, but that meaning can be quite different to the intended one in the KJV. For example, "We fetched a compass" nowadays means, "We collected a direction-finding device," and "David left his carriage in the hand of the keeper" gives a reader today the idea of some kind of vehicle.

Because so many of the archaic words and phrases do have a meaning today, albeit a different one, how would a reader know that he/she needed to look up that meaning? Consider 2 Samuel 22.19:

They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the LORD was my stay.
​

This is David talking about his enemies, so it would be quite natural to think that he means that they stopped him from doing something (our meaning of the word "prevent"), so why should the reader think that he needs to look the word up?

 

Fine, as far as Bdellium and plaiting are concerned, but "prevent" in the KJV means "go before", not "stop something from happening", and "exact" means "require or obtain something", not "precise".

 

I agree with this. Most of these words do not require a dictionary.

And who cares if a FEW of them do? So what?

This is true in MOST books written by intelligent authors.

I began reading Moby Dick a while back. It required me to KEEP a dictionary by my side.

But I think it would be a terrific mistake to try to contemporize this classic.

It would be one thing if people have become so dumb and the language has devolved so greatly that most today cannot understand the language. Then in response to this tragedy we might need to dumb down the language and have a translation for modern man born in a horribly intellectually handicapped age.

I do not think we are there yet, though.

I do not think we should abandon Shakespeare just because the language today is not as descriptive.

I am not for throwing aside Spurgeon just because his sermons were so beautifully written and hard for people who just read bland, wooden language to understand.

And I am not for abandoning the KJV for the same reasons.

Push education. Don't answer a lack of it with compromise- that's my feelings on the matter.

 

These books were written by men for men. God's word was written by God for His people. If we don't want to 'dumb down' would we not be best to learn Greek and Hebrew?

The English Bible has been updated as the English language changed and developed. It has not 'dumbed down' it has simply changed. Languages do that. There is nothing divine about the English used in the KJV.

I doubt that many of us could read Wycliffe's marvelous English translation. Does that mean that it should never have been dumbed down and we should still read 'Therfore, britheren, Y biseche you bi the mercy of God, that ye yyue youre bodies a lyuynge sacrifice, hooli, plesynge to God, and youre seruyse resonable. And nyle ye be confourmyd to this world, but be ye reformed in newnesse of youre wit, that ye preue which is the wille of God, good, and wel plesynge, and parfit?'

The problem is marking an English translation as a benchmark and refusing to move from that. For those who want to do the work to read and use their KJV more power to them. I do it all the time. But I don't mind using using the NKJV so that when I preach I don't have to translated English words into English.

 

But "clave" in the KJV is not a percussion instrument. It's either: 1. the past tense of the verb "cleave", meaning "to split", as in "God clave a hollow place" (Judges 15.19), or 2. the past tense of the verb "cleave", meaning "to cling to", as in "But Ruth clave unto her" (Ruth 1.14). And I am not sure where you got the idea that the claves, the Laitin American percussion instrument, have slits in them. From http://www.gandharvaloka.com/en/percussion.html#Claves :

Claves are a percussion instrument from Latin American music. Originally Claves were long ship nails used as instruments. Nowadays Claves are produced from different materials like hardwood, fibre-glass and plastic. Meanwhile they are used in many music genres.
Claves are a pair of simple sound sticks 20 or 30cm long. When struck together they produce a high penetrating tone. The holding hand should form a resonating space underneath the sound stick.
​

And yes, if you ask a musician about sackbuts, he will tell you that there were the predecessors of the trombone. But the Hebrew word translated "sackbut" in the KJV does not, I am told, refer to a brass instrument with a slide, or indeed to any wind instrument, but to a triangular stringed instrument. (Perhaps someone with a good knowledge of Hebrew could confirm this). From my knowledge of the history of music, the first trombone-type sackbuts didn't appear on the scene until the 14th or 15th century.

 

You don't get this, Sissy?? She was to help Adam fry the "meet". Duh!! They didn't have "sizzlean" waaaay back then!! She was the one who fried the "meet", therefore, she "help"ed Adam. Gosh, I thought that was quite simple......like me!! LOL :tongue3:

 

All words in the NIV:

abashed, abutted, algum, allots, ally, aloes, ardent, armlets, astir, awl, battlements, behemoth, belial, bereaves, betrothed, bier, blighted, booty, brayed, breaching, breakers, buffeted, burnished, calamus, capital (not a city), carnelian, carrion, centurions, chasm, chronic, chrysolite, cistern, citadel, citron, clefts, cohorts, colonnades, coney, congealed, contrite, convocations, crest, cors, curds, dandled, dappled, debauchery, deluged, denarii, depose, derides, despoil, dire,dispossess, disrepute, dissipation, distill, dissuade, divination, dragnet, dropsy, duplicity, earthenware, ebony, emasculate, encroach, enmity, enthralled, entreaty, ephod, epicurean, ewe, excrement, exodus, factions, felled, festal, fettered, filigree, flagstaff, fomenting, forded, fowler, gadfly, galled, gird, gauntness, gecko, gloating, goiim, harrowing, hearld, henna, homers, hoopoe, ignoble, incur, indignant, insatiable, insolence, invoked, jambs, joists, jowls, lairs, leviathan, libations, loins, magi, manifold, maritime, mattocks, maxims, mina, mother-of-pearl, mustering, myrtles, naive, otorious, Nubians, odious, offal, omer, oracles, overweening, parapet, parchments, pavilion, peals (noun, not the verb), perjurers, pinions, phylacteries, plumage, pomp, porphyry, portent, potsherd, proconsul, propriety, poultice, Praetorium, pretext, profligate, qualm, quarries, quivers (noun, not verb), ramparts, ransacked, ratified, ravish, rabble, rawboned, relish (not for hotdogs), recoils, recount, refrain, relent, rend, reposes, reputed, retinue, retorted, retribution, rifts, roebucks, rue, sachet, satraps, sated, shipwrights, siegeworks, sinews, sistrums, sledges, smelted, soothsayer, sovereignty, spelt, stadia, stench, stipulation, sullen, tamarisk, tanner, temperate, tether, tetrarch, terebinth, thresher, throes, thronged, tiaras, tinder, tracts, tresses, turbulent, t unscathed, unrelenting, usury, vassal, vaunts, vehemently, verdant, vexed, wadi, wield, winnowing .




I really get tired of the old "the KJV is too hard to understand" line. If that's true. so is the NIV.

 

I think the NIV is a poor translation for reasons deeper than the hard words, but a good number of those words are understandable (I know a great number of them. Is abutted, for example, a difficult word? Or abutted? Or allots? etc.) and some are transliterations. The problem is not unfamiliar ones, we are always going to encounter those, the problem is words that have not been in common usage for hundreds of years, or words that have changed meaning completely.

For example, I love the phrase 'be careful for nothing.' I love the meaning of 'full of cares.' But the average reader who picks up his KJV and reads that will think that carelessness is a way of life as long as we take everything to God in prayer.

 

No,many are in the KJV too. Back in 2008 I made a thread called :A Challenge For Some. B4L came up with the same list of words. He got it from Will Kinney the noted KJVO'er (banned from the BB). Kinney appropriated the list with no acknowledgement from Laurence Vance -- super KJVO'er and super anti-Calvinist.

Most of the words on the list are very understandable. A native English speaker who of modest education should be familiar with many of the words.

I will list just a few that even B4L should know.

abashed,allots,aloes,ardent,astir,bereaves,betrothed,
naive,derides,dire,duplicity,dissuade,insolence,
indignant,insatiable,rue,perjurers,chasm,chronic,
vehement,recount,pomp

How can those words and many others from the list be considered "hard" words?

What he should have done was to compose a list of his own making that shows words unique to the NIV that he considers difficult.

The bottom line is that since the KJV is so old there are going to be an overwhelming number of misunderstood words and word groupings in the KJV. It behooves (LOL) a Christian to obtain a Bible in their own language of today. The accuracy will be better. The reading will be enhanced. The Lord will be pleased.

Take a passage especially in the Old Testament from the KJV and ask a high school student to decipher it. Then ask another student of the same age bracket to explain the same passage in the NIV -- no problem. Let's be honest here.

The KJV was good in its time (although I think that the Geneva Bible was even better)but it is not as good these days. There are superior choices out there.

 

It seems American English differs from British English more than I thought!

Almost all the words in your list (except technical terms like "satrap" and "tetrarch", and foreign weights, measures and currency like "omer" and "denarii") are common in modern British English.

Are words such as pomp, sullen, cistern, chasm, and ally really so unknown in America that they are hard to understand?

What words do Americans use for: female sheep (if not "ewe"), holder for arrows (if not "quiver"), the material on which documents were written before paper (if not "parchment")?

It would have been interesting to have seen the word used by the KJV beside each of your NIV words.

Of your 23 words beginning with A or B (I haven't gone through the whole list), 14 are to be found in the KJV, including "awl" which in the KJV is spelled "aul".

 

Maybe thats part of the reason the list seems so simple - I have been here quite a while

 

Geneva?- madness!

I have new versions and like many new versions, but I disagree that God will be more pleased with one who reads a modern version over the VERY scholarly and powerfully used King James Version.

If one lacks the education to understand the KJV then sure- read a good modern version- or even if folks just prefer it for whatever reason- that's fine.

But the best route is to press folks to learn TOO.

We don't dumb down Shakespeare, or Moby Dick.

Cliff notes are fine, modern versions of those books are fine, but let's not say that a modern version of Shakespeare makes one a better student of Shakespearean Dramas.

It doesn't.

Neither does using a modern version of Scripture make one a superior student of God's Word.

Neither does sticking to the KJV make one superior.

But there are good points in both the KJV and modern versions.

 

As long as we are reading God's word I don't think He is too concerned whether it is the Bishop's Bible, The Geneva Bible, The KJV, or a quality modern version.

Not using the KJV, by the way, does not imply that one 'lacks the education.'

 

Not to me- and I'm no genius.

But the education system here is so poor the need for dumbed down language in a version is increasing.

Did you have a Classical education, David?