Did you know that King James actually translated the word?

Question

Poisoner to witch? The actually passage had nothing to do with witches? Read up on your translations before you go judgeing us. By your own admission, you are not adering to God's Book.

Oh wow so many questions
One of the verses is "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live" Type into a search bar and you will get more sources then you know what to do with.
I am well aware that King James didn't do the actualy translation himself. Duh.
I am no more ignorant then anyone else spouting at the mouth on this site
And I didn't put everyone into the catagory of using the KJV but a lot of Christians do and profess it to be the only truth around. Hmm I think I covered it all.

http://www.hollowhill.com/fun/halloween/witch-bible.htm
There is one of the sources. I am not pasting the whole web.

We are all poisoner? That is really funny. We don't believe in harming anyone. Its against our faith. If we are to burn in hell that is between us and God. You have no right to go around chanting Though shall not suffer a witch to live. Its not ever right?!?!?!

You guys are killing me.
Ok, a lot of my phrases are probably phrased wrong out of hurt feelings and just plain frusterations.
My point on all of this is many (not all) take that single verse and apply it to people they don't know, have never met and know nothing about thier faith. And believe it not there are ppl who take it literally. Some people have been physically threatened for being a witch. We aren't evil. We just believe something different.

Answer 1

There is a lot of words that are either archaic and some that are not used correctly.
The word you may be particularly concerned about, ,(phar·ma·ki´a), may be the one that should have been translated druggery, or spiritism, rather that witchcraft.

Answer 2

I actually posted a ? the other day about who is King James, and why his bible was any better. Several cristians answered stating that he had someone take the hebrew scrolls and translate them to the best of their ability into English the way it was spoke at that time. So realy, they believe everything written in this book, that was actually just an interpretation of some writing that was found how many years ago, and they actually live by this.. How ignorant does that sound. A bunch of men made up stories, they combined the stories into a book, and wrote it how they wanted it to be understood.

Answer 3

Well, according to Strongs:
1) (Piel) to practice witchcraft or sorcery, use witchcraft
a) sorcerer, sorceress (participle)

According to Gensenius:
To offer prayers or worship. Like many syriac words relating to worship, this also in Hebrew is restricted to worship of idols and means -
To use enchantment, or in its noun form: an enchanter or magician.

If you wish to make this claim, and I have heard wiccans make it before, please back your assertion with credible scholarship and cite your sources.

Lastly, I never made any "admission" to not adering [sic] to God's book. Do you take this passage to mean I should kill you for being a witch? Strange you would take a verse out of context (from a law for the Jews) which opposes you, then call me a hypocrite for not doing as it says when I am a gentile who is not now nor have I ever been under the law of Moses.

ps: Here's the verse for those of you wondering what the beef is:
Exd 22:18 ¶ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Edit:
Oh brother! Are we hold the website you gave as credible? It begins by name calling King James, and whether he deserves it or not, this is not the tone of a scholarly work but of someone with an axe to grind. Further, we are supposed to take the word of all of these "sources" since we can not go verify them ourselves.

Answer 4

The KJV is a particularly poor translation, with more than 3,500 translational errors, some more egregious than the one you mentioned. For example, translating the Hebrew phrase for "horned beasts" as "unicorns" instead of the obvious correct translation found in every other version of the Bible - "cattle". The fact is, the translators appointed by King James were simply not expert in the ancient languages, and many of their guesses are simply wrong.

Answer 5

Yes and he made many additions to it. Later translations of the bible, Including the NIV, went back to the original documents and translated into modern day language. Scholars from every Christian denominatin got together so that there would be no bias on the translations. There are many verses which talk about witchcraft and God clearly condemns it.

Answer 6

King James had nothing what-so-ever to do with the "translation".... all he did was basicaly pay the bills of those who did. Many of those who worked on the original KJV were not even Christian... but they were greek and Hebrew Scholars... they made the best effort, todate, to use the best equivilant english word... based on the original indicators of the intent of the original word... given that the original texts used over 11,000 individual words and there were only about 6,000 english equivilents... they did a good job... and I have read up on this...

"Translations" aside... The forces of evil are against God... and witchcraft is from the forces of evil... I was personaly aware of this long befor I ever knew The Truth of The Word of God... that makes any involved in witchcraft against God.

Answer 7

This is why is a good thing to look to the original languages for correct interpretation if there is a question like this.

Those interested in word study tools could invest in some lexicons. I suggest:
"The Complete Word Study Old Testament" by Spiros Zodhiates
"The Complete Word Study Dictionary Old Testament" by Warren Baker and Eugene Carpenter
"The Complete Word Study New Testament" by Spiros Zodhiates
and "The Complete Word Study Dictionary New Testament" by Spiros Zodiates

Dig in and study the Bible. God has a definite opinion regarding witchcraft and sorcery and it is not a favorable opinion.

Answer 8

Well it wasn't actually King James doing the translating, but this would be interesting if it were true. I'll do some research.

Interesting, why would the bible say,"Do not suffer a 'wise person' to live?

The point many seem to be missing is that hundreds of thousands were tortured and killed because of this mistranslation.

Answer 9

Oh really? That's interesting. I'll have to refer back to the other few thousand copies of the original texts to figure out what that actual word means...

While I do that (or not), why don't you consider the scripture that says that says that all liars will have their part in a lake of fire. It's a good thing these texts are reliable or some people might translate liars to witches too... Oh wait... The bible says that witches will end up there too... Nevermind it works either way.

I would say that witches are spiritual poisioners. But I don't get your point. Are you inferring that the bible is inaccurate because one word in the English language might be translated wrong?

Answer 10

I didn't know that! Thank you!

By the way, I understand that some versions try to translate every word to their language exactly as it is, but let the meaning suffer. And other versions try to go for the meaning in a sentence, with lets the exact translation of each word suffer. (I guess you just can't have it both ways.)