The Bible Doesn't Say That: 40 Biblical Mistranslations, Misconceptions, and Other Misunderstandings

by Joel M. Hoffman

Those who follow them earn interest on them in this world, while the principal investment, the keren, is safely squirreled away for use in the world to come. We see the latter meaning of “fund” more generally in the Hebrew name of the global real-estate project called the Jewish National Fund.

Horns, however, are now negative, connoting evil in general or the Devil more specifically. This is why “horned” and “glowing” are now practically opposites, even though they used to mean roughly the same thing.

If Michelangelo’s statue is misleading, it’s only because the implications of horns have changed.

Jesus in the New Testament isn’t just any old mortal. He is the mortal.

More broadly, we learn that simply reading the words of the Bible is not enough to understand them.

“Parousia”

What we see, though, is that the path from the Bible to the (pre-trib) rapture involves separating 1 Thessalonians 4 from Matthew 24, putting 1 Thessalonians 4 before the tribulations of Matthew 24, and taking the text in 1 Thessalonians 4 literally while ignoring other eschatological passages. There is no rapture in the Bible.

The professional atheist Christopher Hitchens made just this error in a widely viewed online video that he prepared for Vanity Fair. In it, he contrasts the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (which, as we’ll see in chapter 38, is actually a mistranslation) with Moses’s actions afterward, when, Hitchens says, Moses ordered all his supporters to draw their swords and kill their friends. His implication is that the Bible has no value because it is so massively inconsistent, first warning not to kill and then describing killing. But Hitchens—and more like him—have made a fundamental mistake, wrongly assuming that every part of the Bible is meant as a simplistic “do this” message.

Religious leaders are supposed to ground their religious teachings in scripture. And as we saw in chapter 23, the tradition of using scripture in new ways goes back at least two thousand years.

But we don’t see any particular condemnation of polygamy where it occurs.

Clearly relevant, though, is Deuteronomy 25:5, which provides that the brother of a deceased man must marry his dead brother’s wife, in what has become known as a Levirate marriage. (The word comes from the Latin levir, which means “brother-in-law.”) The verses that follow in Deuteronomy underscore the importance of this obligation, and don’t contain an exception if the surviving brother happens already to be married. So some Levirate marriages have the effect of not only permitting polygamy but actually requiring it. (Most Jews today do not follow this practice, but until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, it was common among some Jews in Arab countries, as was polygamy more generally.)

So we have nonconclusive examples of biblical men who had multiple wives, descriptions of how to behave with additional wives, and at least one regulation requiring multiple wives.

And Matthew quotes it, along with Genesis 1:27, in his discussion of marriage, but Matthew has a slightly different version of Genesis 2:24. His text, based on the Greek translation of Genesis 2:24, adds an extra word: “two.” His text reads, “and the two of them become one flesh.” These “two,” say people who look for monogamy in the Bible, represent the only number of people allowed in a marriage.

it’s just as compatible with polygamy. A man could marry several women, becoming “one” with each of them simultaneously.

Either way, though, the obvious implication when this criterion is applied to those seeking high office is that it was not applied to everyone else.

So 1 Timothy seems to suggest, if not prove, that polygamy was accepted. It also suggests that monogamy was considered better than polygamy, because the other qualities in the lists all seem positive.

What we see, then, is that even though later mainstream Christian and Jewish traditions enforced monogamy, “biblical” marriage is not necessarily monogamous, and in some cases may even have to be polygamous.

However, one reason we don’t see divorce in the Bible is that a husband was able to take a second wife without leaving the first one, as we saw in the last chapter. Depending on how the husband and first wife behaved after he took a second wife, we might now recognize these marriages to a second wife either as essentially entailing divorce from the first or as polygamy.

The New Testament is more complicated. It speaks against divorce, primarily in the context of postdivorce sex, but in the same context speaks against marriage altogether. A strict reading of the text would prohibit marriage along with divorce. A slightly more lenient reading would allow marriage (in accord with the proviso in Matthew 19:11 that “not everyone can accept” the teaching of never marrying). More lenient yet is a condemnation of remarriage but an acceptance of divorce. And more lenient than that is a recognition that divorce is like other common sexual sins that are part of the human condition.

In this regard, divorce in the Bible is a little like marriage: We saw in the last chapter that monogamy was considered better than polygamy, but both were accepted.

Oral Roberts took 3 John 1:2 completely out of context when he turned it into a statement about what God wants for us now. And others followed his lead. But 3 John 1:2 is not about prosperity. It’s a social nicety.

James 4 is about the source of “conflicts and disputes,” according to verse 4:1. They come from trying to acquire things for pleasure, instead of focusing on God. James is not about how to get things. It’s about the perils of wanting them.

Indeed, the general thrust of the New Testament is a shift in attention from this world alone to varying combinations of this world and the next. Some parts focus on the world to come (“eternal life,” for instance) and some on the connection with our life here and whatever comes next. Different authors express different views, but the point is always that our lives are bigger than the corporeal, physical, earthly existence that is most obvious. This approach necessarily has two parts, an emphasis on the world to come and a deemphasis of this world. As such, the prosperity Gospel is at odds with the thrust of the New Testament.

In fact, the theme of helping the needy is one of the most pervasive and consistent in the Bible. By contrast, personal wealth and prosperity is generally a minor matter, considered positive only when it helps the less fortunate, and otherwise deemed neutral or even detrimental.

an example of violence does not necessarily condone violence,

(A myriad is ten thousand.)

Saul is convinced that David will inherit the kingdom by virtue of his unmatched violence.

The Greek text reads “Arameans” in verse 8 but “Edomites” in verse 13. In Hebrew, the difference between the two words is just one letter—a d or an r—and because of the shapes of those two letters, they are easy to mix up.)

Most of the numbers in the Bible are symbolic.)

the spirit of violence is unmistakable.

And lest there be any doubt, the book of Revelation seals the deal. Jesus (Revelation 14:14–16) will appear on a white cloud “with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand.” An angel will urge the crowned cloud dweller to use the sickle and reap, “for the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” So “the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped.”

So like the Old Testament, the New Testament has its share of extreme violence.

Clearly, the Old and New Testaments in the Bible contain vivid passages of both violence and of tranquillity.

The biggest hidden stumbling block to understanding what the Bible says about peace is the word “peace” itself. At its core, peace is the opposite of war. But our modern, English word has other central connotations, most notably tolerance. Whether it’s two people or two nations making peace, the point is to live side by side.

But rather than implying tolerance and coexistence, they imply the peace that comes between two parties when one of them is so thoroughly beaten that it can no longer fight back.

If there’s going to be peace, what need is there of strength?

strength was used to conquer the enemy.

Crushing the enemy is no longer seen...

The core meaning of “peace” now and in antiquity was a lack of strife, and that hasn’t changed. It’s the implications that are different. But a word’s implications, much more than its core meaning, are flexible. To see how, we need only reflect on the modern English word “peace.” Though it usually means coexistence, we still use it to describe the pax romana. It was a peaceful time, just not the typical kind of peace that the word now implies in English.

For instance, the passage from Deuteronomy 20:10 stipulates that “when you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace.” That sounds peaceful. But the next line instructs, “if it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor.” We don’t call that “peace” anymore. We call it “unconditional surrender.”

There’s lots of violence and there’s also lots of peace, but peace is always considered better than war. And the consistent hope for the future is that war will give way to peace.

In other words, we usually find accounts of past violence, and hopes for future peace.

violence. The text there deals with a people called the Amalekites, led by Amalek. Though they don’t exist anymore, they were an archenemy of sorts to the Israelites.

(There’s also a certain irony in being told not to forget to blot out a name. This very command to blot out the name has ensured the continuation of Amalek’s name, to the extent that Amalek, though long gone, is far better remembered than most of ancient Israel’s other enemies in the Bible.) In the New Testament, too, the violence is what happened, while peace is what should happen, with, again, an exception for justice. We therefore find a hierarchy or sorts: Peace trumps violence, but justice in turn trumps peace.

One “justice” is for the defense, the other “justice” for the prosecution, both of whom have an obligation to find an impartial judge, even as they advocate for their clients.)

Justice is closely related with fairness.

One of the innovations of the Old Testament was to apply this principle evenly to every member of society, including the privileged class.

Numbers 35:31–32 specifically prohibits rich killers from buying their way out of a death sentence or jail term.

But to this day, there are large swaths of the earth where the rich can act with impunity, their wealth serving to isolate them from legal consequences. The Old Testament would not approve.

Children complain when they are punished for something they didn’t do, but also when their friends get away unpunished after some illicit deed.