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

by Joel M. Hoffman

Worse, the really important rewards and punishments are themselves beyond the reach of human actors: health versus sickness, prosperity from good crops versus ruin from natural disaster, peace versus strife in the home, and much more.

For that matter, courts are imperfect and humans are not infallible.

The first is that the imperfections of human justice will someday be replaced with God’s universal and unflawed justice, as we saw in Isaiah’s vision of a better future in our chapter 20. The second is that in the meantime God will take up the slack, as it were. Deuteronomy 11 promises rewards for obedience to God, and, similarly, punishment for disobedience.

The problem is that life doesn’t seem to work this way.

But sometimes the reward and punishment aren’t doled out in this life. Life after death evens things out.

This message of eventual (and eternal) justice in the world to come was particularly attractive in a Jerusalem occupied by cruel Roman forces. The

So justice is hugely important in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The difference is that the Old Testament focuses more on what humans can do to bring it about, while the New Testament focuses more on what God will do.

By contrast, the justice in the New Testament is primarily a matter for the world to come.

This New Testament vengeance in the world-to-come takes the place of Old Testament vengeance in this world. Both are part of the same kind of justice system. They just differ in their timing.

Christians recorded their revisions to the Old Testament in the New Testament, while Jews wrote theirs in their influential commentaries to the Bible.

This is another way of saying that good deeds in this life are rewarded in the next.

All of this reflects the Bible’s insistence that peace is better than war, and tranquillity better than violence, even as the Bible recognizes that humankind has yet to achieve that ideal.

He gets up and walks, as though just the act of standing required considerable effort, a characterization that seems to be reinforced by the literal meaning of Manoah: “sedentary,” or perhaps even “lazy bum.”

Throughout the story, Manoah is a bumbling buffoon, the foil for his heroine wife. She sees things for what they are; he’s clueless. She is entrusted with the upbringing of the future Samson; he is told to let his wife take care of things. She is enthusiastic and energetic; he needs all his energy just to stand up. Yet for all of this, he has a name and she doesn’t.

The namelessness of the woman seems to be only a matter of style, not a judgment about her merit.

This story of Manoah and his wife is incompatible with a culture that always values men over women.

So “father” and “mother” meant “more powerful than,” just as “son” and “daughter” meant “less powerful than.”

“Brother” and “sister” meant “equal in power.” The point of the text here is that the man repeatedly calls the woman “my equal.”

are still relevant, because they show us something important about the culture that produced the Old Testament.

But this passage in Genesis seems to describe the then-current state of affairs, not any particular ideal. While some people take these lines to mean that husbands should rule over wives, no one seriously suggests that the text prohibits anesthesia or meditation to mitigate a woman’s pain in childbirth.

Colossians 3:18 demands of wives that they be subject to their husbands. Interestingly, this is a passage that we mentioned briefly in chapter 31 in the context of slavery, because the text continues, “[19] Husbands, love your wives … [20] Children, obey your parents … [21] Fathers, do not provoke your children … [22] Slaves, obey your human masters.” (The word “human” here, commonly translated “earthly,” is probably intended to make it clear that the Greek word for “master,” kurios, which also means “lord,” doesn’t refer to “the Lord” in this case.)

When we discussed slavery in chapter 31, we noted two possible interpretations. Either slavery is good; or, so long as slavery exists, there’s a right way to do it, but slavery itself is bad. These same two interpretations potentially present themselves regarding gender relations in Colossians 3:18.

For that matter, Ephesians 5:22 (“wives, be subject to your husbands”) is preceded by “be subject to one another,” potentially making the deference of a woman to a man just one example of human deference more generally.

This isn’t a completely crazy position to take. After all, biblical marriage allowed polygamy, while modern marriage does not. But it certainly pushes the boundaries of “what the Bible says” beyond what most people are comfortable with. If marriage is different only because of social norms, what else might be different? And how would we know?

But that famous English phrase, which comes from the KJV, is a mistranslation.

But the original Hebrew is clear, in spite of considerable confusion among translations: It only refers to illegal killing, and it refers to every kind of illegal killing.

And again, people often choose what they want the text to mean.

In other words, it’s not that the Bible demanded an eye for an eye, but, rather, that it prohibited anything more than an eye for eye. But there is little evidence to support this common claim. The Old Testament passages here do seem to demand retaliation.

If someone hits you on one cheek, don’t hit the person back, but, just the opposite, offer your other cheek as a target as well. (As we saw in chapter 36, the reasoning here is that the temporary injustice in this world pales in comparison to the final accounting in the world to come, but the effect is still to reverse lex talionis.)

(American law, too, rejects the lex talionis of the Bible in favor of financial compensation. But an interesting difference may set apart the American system and the Jewish one. In America, an aggressor who pays a victim has made things equal. The victim no longer has any claim against the aggressor. By contrast, the Rabbis’ system suggests that the financial payment does not make up for bodily harm; it’s just the closest we can come.)

“manslayers” and the more serious “murderers.”

These are the real details about killing in the Bible, and the sparse language of the Bible often hides the depth of the text.

In these senses, the biblical laws are harsher than many modern ones.

only if two people witness the murder.

Blood pollutes the land, and the only way to make up for shedding blood on the land is in turn to shed the blood of the one who first shed blood.

Exodus 22:2–3, according to which a homeowner is allowed to kill a thief who breaks in at night, but not during the day.

While this middle-ground conclusion strikes many people as reasonable, and, equally, seems like a reasonable interpretation of Exodus, it is not the only reasonable interpretation.

Luke 11:21 is not about self-defense.

Underlying this touching passage is the assumption that many soldiers, even with God’s help, will not return.

Peace is better than war, but what if peace isn’t possible? Life is better than death, just as God’s moral ways are better than ungodly immoral ways; but what if the only way to stop people from promoting immoral behavior is to kill them? Most people prefer to live their life rather than risk it by serving as a soldier, but what if soldiers are necessary for people to live life? What if war comes at a particularly inopportune time for some people?

In summary, then, illegal killing is, obviously, always forbidden. And it comes in two degrees of severity (as detailed in Numbers). Illegal killing is also immoral (according to the Ten Commandments). It has to be punished, possibly by death. Lethal force may be an acceptable response to a home invasion. And killing during wartime was a necessary evil, to be used only as a last resort.

Killing is a matter of morality, and the blood of the slain pollutes the earth.

Leviticus 18:22 warns a man not to “lie with a man as with a woman,” because doing so is what most translations call “an abomination.”

“Sin” is the religious parallel to “illegal,” and arbitrarily deciding that something is a “sin” because you don’t like it is like arbitrarily deciding that something is illegal just because you don’t like it. So saying that Leviticus calls homosexuality a sin is a double misrepresentation.

We’ve already seen that Leviticus doesn’t address homosexuality in general, but even if it did, these people would be bound to follow it only in the same sense that they are locked into an anti-sha’atnez position. To claim no choice about denouncing male homosexual sex is to claim no choice about denouncing clothing that mixes wool and linen.

So Leviticus addresses the very limited question of whether male homosexual sex is okay, and answers with a clear “no.” But Leviticus doesn’t make it clear how important an issue it was.

The Bible is about people. So it’s crucial that we know what counts as a person.

That is, someone who causes a woman to miscarry has to pay a fine. From this statute it follows that the fetus couldn’t possibly be a human being, because we know—from Numbers, as we discussed in chapter 38—that there are only two acceptable penalties for wrongly killing a human: death or life imprisonment (technically, imprisonment until the death of the high priest). We

The damages demanded in Exodus 21:22 are inconsistent with a fetus being a human.

That’s because the original Hebrew refers to a woman “whose offspring leaves her” after she is hit.