(December 30, 2022 at 9:23 pm)Jehanne Wrote: All translations, with few exceptions, are imperfect. For instance, the Middle English of Shakespeare's day, is somewhat to mostly intelligible to us, but even in modern English, the meaning and nuances of some Elizabethan expressions is simply lost to time. Ditto for the original Hebrew, the Greek of Septuagint and the Aramaic of Jesus' day. Any Old English text (of which there are only a handful of extant manuscripts) would be completely unintelligible to the modern ear.
And, so, with respect to the verses cited by the OP, no one can say for sure what the original authors intended or the subsequent redactions and edits that took place later. That the Hebrews worshipped multiple gods, at least early on, is certain with Yahweh becoming the dominant and only god that led to the rise of Jewish and Christian theism. If anything, we should read both the Old & New Testaments as being more suggestive of an author's intent giving greater weight to the historical and cultural context when the text was supposedly written than the literalness of the text. Ancient authors were simply not that exact in their writings.
Notwithstanding all that, today a literal interpretation of the KJV is used in attempts to develop science curricula in publicly-funded schools and is used to inform American jurisprudence as high as the Supreme Court. So a literal interpretation of the KJV is what I use to fight against it.
