Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
When the English moved, not the Greek
Roughly a hundred and thirty-six King James phrases now say something the Greek and Hebrew never said. Not one of them is a translation error.
That is awful. It used to mean full of awe, and it was a compliment. She is nice used to mean she is foolish. Nobody rewrote those sentences. The words walked off and left them standing.
Because this is the single largest source of confident wrong arguments about English Bibles, and it has nothing to do with Greek or Hebrew at all. Learning the four shapes here means you will stop reaching for a lexicon when what you needed was a dictionary of older English.
This is the one category in the whole tool where the original languages are not the problem. English is.
Not a lemma: an English dictionary problem
Semantic shift is the ordinary drift of meaning in a living language, and linguists sort it into four shapes. The King James translators wrote accurate English in 1611. English then moved underneath the text for four centuries while the text stayed still. Prevent meant go before. Letteth meant hinders, the opposite of what it now suggests. Suffer the little children meant permit them.
Nothing here is a Greek or Hebrew problem at all, which is precisely why it belongs in a tool about the original languages. Most readers cannot tell a translation dispute from a dictionary change, and that confusion produces some of the most confident wrong arguments about the Bible in English.
Before you accuse a modern version of changing the Bible, look up what the King James word meant in 1611. If the English moved, the modern version is correcting for your dictionary, not for the text. This is the first check, not the last, because it disposes of a very large share of the arguments.
There is nothing to choose in the original languages. The only decision a modern translator makes is whether to keep a word that has drifted and add a footnote, or replace it and lose the connection to four centuries of English usage.
- Is It Actually in the Bible, KJV word, meaning shifted, 136 of 225 claims
- The four standard categories of semantic change: narrowing, broadening, pejoration, amelioration
- Oxford English Dictionary, historical senses, for every case in this family
