Do you know why translators of any language change the word order in their translations? For example, the the word order of the German language is almost opposite of the English language. So a word-for-word translation will be gibberish in English.
hebrew actually translates remarkably well. modern hebrew uses english word order. biblical hebrew tends to transpose the subject and the verb. so where we might say in english, "god created the heavens and the earth," we'd say in modern hebrew "
elohim bara et-ha-shamim v'et-ha-aretz". in biblical hebrew, "
bara elohim et-ha-shamim v'et-ha-aretz."
now, we could tranlate the above idea a little less literally, and get at the heart of the idea. "heaven and earth" is a merismus, meaning "everything." so we could say, "god made everything." is that a wrong way to translate the verse? it more forcibly gets the idea acroos languages, but loses the flavor of the language. literal v. idiomatic is an old debate, and both have their pros and cons.
So the tunnel vision of those who think that the bible is going to be a word-for-word translation keeps them from seeing that the meaning of the bible never changes.
well, let's think about this for a moment. did the meaning change between the version of same sentance i posted? well, not really. the style changed, and you might not have been aware of the meaning, so it might have changed for you. and it's also lost the literal quality -- say in genesis 1:1, "heaven" and "earth" are literally reflected in the next two verses. it's kind of a cliff notes version: clearer in some ways, but losing the details.
let's also look at the above translation a little more critically. what's with that "et?" well, there isn't a work for it in english. and it's a pretty common hebrew word. what the heck do you do there? well, you leave it out.
et signifies a specific object as the direct object (grammatically) of the sentance. we don't use that in english. word-for-word isn't strictly possible, because hebrew is not english, but you can still translate literally, word-
by-word without translating idioms. and that's not to say one is better than the other.
So the "mistranslation" argument is onot only ludicrous, but it proves that those who use that argument have NO CLUE what the meaning of the bible is actually saying.
in general, this is true. "mistranslation" arguments are typically the crutch for poor ideology. though, there are a few legitimate cases of mistranslation, or even
guessed at what a certain word might mean. and this is not to say that we cannot compare different translations, both one to another, and one to source, to determine which ones are "better" subjectively. or maybe even objectively.
So I suggest they use the Interlinear Bible since they are so eager to prove the bible wrong which they never can.
interlinear hebrew gives me a headache. you have to keep switching from reading right to left, to left to right. give me a parallel any day. interlinear is okay for greek.
but i'd like to say a word or two against concordances. for all the faulty "mistranslation" arguments, it always seems people are "retranslating" using a concordance and a root-word dictionary. this is monumentally bad practice -- it totally strips a word of all conjugation, idiomatic and grammatic context, and people often use to switch around inappropriate other usages. someone on this board once used this technique to distort the text into describing moses cd-rom collection. it is MUCH better to learn the language a little, and read the actual hebrew text. you'll almost always find that the translators generally know what they're doing, and have translated fairly reasonably (though this varies from translation to translation... most real mistranslations have to do with the intricacies of the grammar and parsing of the words themselves).
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