ENGLISH BIBLES
We English readers have a heritage of translations of the bible coming through sixteenth and seventeenth century English early translations. The later translations in English usually never dare to vary from the older ones and copy a lot of the sentences. Perhaps it is because people who buy the later translations are already well versed in the older ones especially the KJV. Yet there is a major weakness in this because the seventeenth century England and France had a strong culture which got incorporated in these early translations into English. For example it was always a puzzle to me what the bible meant by “familiar spirit”. Verses in the books of Moses judged people with familiar spirits - or so it seems from the English translations. Yet actually the familiar spirit tradition is not in the Bible in the Hebrew but is an English traditional belief from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as emerged in the witch trials) and the translators finding words based on the Hebrew root “yada” simply interpreted it using the English and French folk tradition by translating it as “someone (or a woman) with a familiar spirit”. So familiar spirit got inserted artificially. So we can benefit from having other translations not part of this history of translation but from other cultures such as the Peshitta which comes from Syria and is translated into English with care to stay close to the Syriac meanings.
