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The Bible Doesn't Say That: 40 Biblical Mistranslations, Misconceptions, and Other Misunderstandings
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March 9 - April 6, 2025
So, too, people who read the Bible primarily in translation and guided by established religious trends get great insight into those religious trends and the role the Bible plays in them, but the focus on one particular view of the Bible necessarily presents a warped view of the original Bible.
Rapture (which, as we’ll see in chapter 30, is when nonbelievers will be left on earth as believers are transported to be with the Lord) isn’t in the Bible, so believing in the Rapture is no reason to value the Bible. And the Bible doesn’t contradict evolution (chapter 2), so believing in evolution is no reason to dismiss it.
The fifth and final theme is misrepresentation. From time to time, people purposely misquote and otherwise misrepresent the Bible’s text, in furtherance of a particular agenda.
(our chapter 20). These five ways of distorting the Bible’s original message have various common elements. Two are worth pointing out here. The first is mistaking tradition for the original.
A second common element is ignoring the context of an original passage.
So we keep in mind five ways that the Bible gets distorted: ignorance, accident, culture gap, mistranslation, and misrepresentation; and two common elements that they share: misapplying tradition and missing the context.
How does Rashi know that heaven was created from fire and water? Because the Hebrew for “heaven” is shamayim and the Hebrew word for “water” is mayim. The word for “water” is right there in “heaven.” Take the mayim (“water”) out of the shamayim (“heaven”) and you’re left with the consonantal sound sh, which is the sole consonantal component of the Hebrew eish, “fire.” “Heaven,” in Hebrew, is literally composed of “fire” and “water.”
In short, God took six days to create the world, including first the animals, and, finally, man and woman. Then, having finished creating everything, God rested. Then once God had rested after creating everything, man was alone with no women or animals. So God created animals. But man was still lonely, so God created woman. What’s going on?
Two thousand years ago, the historian Josephus summarized the first “account,” as the NRSV calls it, and then characterized the second account as Moses’s philosophical reflection on the first. (Josephus says that Moses wrote Genesis.) For Josephus, then, the first account is what happened; the second is what Moses thought about it.
The incongruities we see in Genesis are typical of the Bible itself, so understanding them is important to understanding the Bible.
The “E” stands for “Elohist,” the author who uses the Hebrew word elohim for God. The “J” is for “Yahwist”—because in German j makes the sound “y”—who calls God “Yahweh.” (We return to God’s name in more detail in chapter 13.) The “D” is a “Deuteronomist” who wrote Deuteronomy, and the “P” is a priestly source who advocated for the priests.
But these three views, in different ways, all miss the fundamental point that the stories do exist side by side. The textual scholars have to explain why the redactor—who was obviously respected enough by the community to have an authoritative voice and scholarly enough to know the different traditions—couldn’t notice what any cursory read of the text reveals. The skeptics have the same problem, augmented by another: If the Bible is so badly written that it falls apart under even the most cursory of readings, why do so many people value it so highly? And the traditional explanations strike
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But our scientific view—which has paved the way for amazing technology like medicine and communications and travel—is a modern innovation. For most of history people saw things differently. In fact, one reason we are so reluctant to give up this modern view is precisely that it is so new. As with any new toy, we are unduly captivated by it.
These logical inconsistencies do not detract from the power of the paintings. Whatever people think of Magritte’s works, their value doesn’t lie in their photographic or scientific accuracy.
For that matter, no one rejects Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities even though, as we saw in the last chapter, it starts off with as clear a contradiction as possible: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The two creation stories are just like Dickens’s two opening sentences. They are two different ways of looking at the same thing, and the job of the reader is to figure out how.
The creation story isn’t history, and it was never meant as history.
Why would anyone think they were meant to be historically accurate? The only reason we do so today is that we are obsessed with science.
Parts of the Bible look like history but they are not. The creation story obviously falls into this category. People who cite the creation story as proof that evolution is wrong, or vice versa, have radically misunderstood the text of Genesis.
People who deny evolution based on Genesis err and close that door. People who force historical or scientific accuracy onto the text make the same mistake.
Or, to look at things the other way around, the biggest reason not to take the creation-in-six-days story literally is that the Bible itself contradicts it, not that modern science contradicts it.
The wording “the nephilim”—not just “nephilim”—reflects the fact that everyone who read Genesis was expected to know who they were.
(The importance of the bitumen and the purpose of the tower is often lost on modern readers, who don’t know that bitumen was used for waterproofing.)
two of Noah’s children are Shem and Ham; Ham has a son named Canaan. Shem—“Sem” in Greek—is the progenitor of the people we now call the Semites, and Canaan is the ancestor of the Canaanites, whom the Jewish Semites will conquer.
What we have, then, is a sequence designed to tell people about the world in which they lived. Included in it are two flood stories, a brief reference to the Watchers that prompted the flood, a quick mention of the failed tower experiment that would have protected the people against another flood, and a slew of names and genealogies that function like a geopolitical map.
The stories are great narratives. There’s a reason they have survived. And they address timeless questions. But an anachronistic focus on history hides their value. In the next chapter we’ll see even more internal evidence that warns us not to read these stories as history.
As with the creation and flood narratives of the past few chapters, people sometimes try to reconcile these numbers with modern science in two ways. One is by taking the figures literally, and assuming that science has misunderstood how long a person can live.
The second way is by trying to massage the data. Maybe “years” in the text means half years.
So in addition to there being no evidence that “year” means anything other than what it seems, there is no mathematically and biologically plausible candidate for what it could mean.
The Bible was written in the context of Babylonian mathematics, before multiplication became easy.
Moses lives to be 120 (2 × 3 × 4 × 5, an especially round number in antiquity). Moses’s successor Aaron lives to be 110—possible, though extreme. From King David on, people live now-normal life spans. In other words, the ages themselves divide the text into three clear sections: many hundreds of years, a couple of hundred years, and fewer than 120 years.
Furthermore, historians generally agree that the only historically accurate part of the Old Testament comes after the death of Moses, because historians have no historical evidence of Adam, Noah, Abraham, etc., but they do know that a kingdom was established around the time of King David.
In this context, the ages seem designed precisely to flag the nonhistorical sections as nonhistorical. It’s as if the text is shouting, Just to make it clear that the flood isn’t the same kind of account as the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587 B.C., we’ll give the characters in the first one ages of many hundreds of years, while the people in the second one will live normal life spans. That’s a sign no one can miss.
These stories were not meant to be historical and their value does not depend on the degree to which they are literally accurate. The ages of the characters help frame the text, and the internal details contribute to the stories’ complexity.
But many readers are unable to see the message of the text. Literalists modify science to accord with the ages in the Bible, and revisionists modify the Bible to match modern science. Both groups of people miss the obvious signs that the texts were not designed to be history. Rather, they are like art, showing us new ways to see the world.
Text of the Bible: “David killed Goliath with a sling and a stone.” Hypothetical Reader: “I thought he killed him with a sword.” Text: “He had no sword.” Reader: “But he only stunned him with the stone.” Text: “Well, come to think of it, he took Goliath’s sword and used that to kill him.” Reader: “Told you so.”
This new passage in 2 Samuel is more problematic. Here Goliath’s foe isn’t the famous King David, founder of Jerusalem. It’s an unknown guy named Elhanan. And because this is part of the historical section of the Bible, the discrepancy is potentially more serious than the kinds of variations we saw in Genesis.
The influential King James Version, from the seventeenth century, even adds the words “the brother of” to 1 Samuel, although they’re not in the original text, masking the issue of the discrepancy from readers.
While it’s certainly possible that real events would be distorted by various mistaken reports, more likely is that all of these accounts—even as part of the historical record of King David’s rise to power—are intended as lessons, not as history.
The English translation “genealogy” reflects the extended genealogy that takes the reader through the first seventeen verses of Matthew. But, in fact, the original Greek word extends well beyond “genealogy” to encompass a combination of “nature of” and “history of.” The genealogy is only one part of the answer to a more general question about Jesus. Matthew is not merely answering “Who were Jesus’s ancestors?” Rather, Matthew’s question—and, therefore, the issue with which the New Testament opens—is “Who is Jesus?” Part of the answer will come in the form of a detailed genealogy. (The next
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(This kind of copying error is so common that it has its own name: homoioarcton—literally, “same beginning.”)
But again, we know there is a third option: Neither list was supposed to be history, even if they include some historical figures. As it happens, there’s an even bigger potential problem with the genealogies. If Jesus was born to a virgin Mary, it doesn’t matter who Joseph was, because even though Joseph was Mary’s husband, he wasn’t Jesus’s father. Jesus’s lineage doesn’t depend on the man Mary happened to marry unless they were both his parents. Yet Jesus has to be the descendant of David.
Largely because people don’t focus on the historical parts of the Bible when they evaluate its accuracy, they tend to reject all of it as a reliable source of history. For instance, noting the absurdity of Adam’s 930-year lifespan, they reject Adam as a historical figure—which is what historians are supposed to do—but they also reject the Bible’s account of David and Jesus. And this is a mistake.
The historian Martin Cohen teaches that the most important question to ask about any historical document is “Who paid for it?” Obviously, a close second is “Who wrote it?”
So we see that, to a naive eye, the Bible is patently wrong. How could Herod die and then, after his own death, order the death of someone else? But the Bible is actually more accurate than it seems. It just used a slightly different naming convention.
the birth of a savior at the “time of King Herod” represents God’s presence when it was most needed.
What the New Testament doesn’t say—but Josephus does—is that Bernice is Agrippa’s sister, with whom the magistrate is having an incestuous affair. Paul is mocking Rome’s representative, sarcastically praising him for knowledge of religious law, yet belittling him for his heathenly behavior. This is another nuance we understand today only thanks to Josephus.
For example, Josephus has little to say about Jesus, but at one point in the Jewish historian’s work named Jewish Antiquities, he calls Jesus “a wise man, if it’s proper to call him a man … He was the Christ.” Josephus appears to describe Jesus’s divinity. But Josephus almost certainly didn’t write those words. All evidence suggests that they were added later. Josephus probably said something, but the very centrality of his opinion has erased it from our historical record as scribes changed the historian’s words. We don’t know what Josephus originally wrote here.
The reason we care is that it was Pilate who oversaw the crucifixion of Jesus. According to the New Testament, the Roman was trying to save Jesus, and it was the Jews who wanted him dead.
Taking this at face value, we find a group of Jews, led by the high priest, who convince the Roman Pontius Pilate, against his will, to condemn Jesus. Then Pilate tells his soldiers to kill Jesus, and they—again, from the New Testament accounts—seem all too happy to follow their orders. They gleefully mock and beat Jesus. But there are lots of reasons not to take the account at face value.
