What's missing from your favorite Bible?

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What's missing from your favorite Bible?

Most Christians know that in the New Testament, the Greek words agape (God's love) and phileo (brotherly love) are generally translated as love in English, even though there are two distinct Greek words. Any translation which does not have unique designation to distinguish between the two would be counted as missing 1 word. The following data are for the Old Testament only, because the New Testament is not complete:

			BIBLE VERSION
FEATURE	ARTB	KJV	NASB	NRSV	NIV	MSG
How many unique ancient words are missing?	0	1219	726	724	772	n/a

The KJV is missing over 1200 unique English words to match unique Hebrew and Aramaic words. Later translations such as the NIV, the NASB and the NRSV added approximately 500 of these unique words to the text, but all are still missing over 700 unique English words to match the Hebrew and Aramaic. The main reason there is not a match between every Hebrew and English word is that most bible versions reuse the same English words again and again. That habit masks the unique ancient roots in the original text.

For example, there are 7 unique Hebrew words about lions in the Old Testament, but most versions only have 4 different words. Most of these are minor in nature, but some are significant. Look at the Word for the Week study about the word oasis to see a significant missing word. Let's take a look at a specific example from the Consistency Table presented in the last section:

		ARTB		NIV		NASB		KJV
STR #	FREQ	Primary Word	%	Primary Word	%	Primary Word	%	Primary Word	%
120	561	human	100%	man	71%	man	87%	man	94%
376	2156	man	100%	man	54%	man	66%	man	67%

What you see is that there are two very distinct words in Hebrew designated by two different Strong's numbers 120 and 376. The major versions primarily reuse the word man for both. The ARTB utilizes the word human for 120 and man for 376 because they are different words.

376 But the confusion goes deeper. If you look up Strong's number 376 for the NASB, you'll find that not only did the NASB utilize the word man in 66% of the cases, but also words like husband, one, persons, and each, to words like tiller, soldier, tradition, and father for the remaining 33% of the cases--close to 1500 references. This is typical of all modern bible translations.

The Ancient Roots Translinear Bible (ARTB) began as a project to see what the Old Testament really looked like with all the missing words restored. But as they were restored, they were always applied with the rule of 1:1 correspondence to the ancient word. So in ARTB, the word human is utilized 100% of the time for Strong's number 120 and no other Strong's number. Show me the important missing word, OASIS.

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Reference for Strong's number 376 is a scan from page 1360 of The Strongest NASB Exhaustive Concordance, Zondervan 2004.

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Text © 2005 - 2010 A. Frances Werner. Ancient Roots®, Translinear®, and ARTB® trademarks, ARTB LLC, Patent pending.
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