Revenge, for a relatively small outlay of cash you can go to a Bible book store, or for that matter a larger general book store and buy yourself a Hebrew to English interlinear Old Testament and a Greek to English interlinear New Testament. I have both and use them a lot when I really want the closest equivalent to the original existing. The interlinear gives the ancient text with the nearest English equivalent directly under each word of the interlinear.
With the New Testament it is nice to have two interlinears, of which I also have both, one for each of the two primary texts used by translators. The first was the
Received text which uses manuscripts generally that are not as old as the other. The other is the text which is taken from some earlier manuscripts. The Received text was used by the King James translators and other lesser translators who went by that text. The Alexandrian text was first used in the 1901 American Standard Bible (ASB) and then later by revisionists of that original work such as the Revised American Standard Version (RASV), the New International Version (NIV), and the New American Standard Version (NASV).
Being a more literalist fundamentalist, my preference and the one I use of all the Bibles is the old 1901 American Standard Bible. Imo, this is the most literal and closest to the original text that exists. Not only that, but to me it makes more sense in some areas. Unfortunately it's one of the least used and hardest to find of all the translations. For one thing, it gives the proper name of God used over 6000 times in all the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament, but has been revised/changed from the proper name, Jehovah/Yaweh/Yhwh to Lord by nearly all translators due to, imo, a silly superstitious notion by later century OT Jews that the name was too sacred to utter or write. Imo, if it was not intended by God to be uttered or written he wouldn't have directed the writers of the books to use it in the first place those thousands of times.
[This message has been edited buzsaw, 05-04-2004]
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past. buz
I deal with some international people on ebay and this will be great for that. The link will be very useful on other occasions, but there is some differences in the ancient Greek used in the NT and the modern Greek which this site uses. It will be close, but with the modern Greek rendering of the words. I copied my interlinear literal Engilsh words and had the link translate them back into Greek to determine the differences.
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