Word for the Week

 

OASIS - See how a "missing word" is found in Solomon's temple.          
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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.

376But 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.

I want to ORDER! 

Take me back to COMPARE BIBLE ACCURACY. 

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