[Ramonabeez]

There are roughly 177,00 words in the King James Version of the Bible. Of these words 12,000 of them differ from each other.. Given that, according to linguists, a normally educated person uses a vocabulary that has about 5,000 words and a well-educated person knows about 10,000 words, it could be concluded that the Bible was not written for the normal everyday person. What say you??

[juanruiz]

Of course the Bible was not written for the everyday normal person, simply because that person was illiterate. That is why much of the Biblical material was communicated through the oral tradition, which may explain the discrepancies in the New Testament Gospels.

[STONY]

Consider That There Is An "if Then" Statement In The Bible. "if Ye Be In Me And I Be In You, Then Ask Anything Of My Father Which Is In Heaven....." That Was Written 2,000 Years Ago And Yet It Is A Modern Day Computer Command. If-then Statements Are Prevalent In Programing.

[Morganite]

There are roughly 177,00 words in the King James Version of the Bible. Of these words 12,000 of them differ from each other.. Given that, according to linguists, a normally educated person uses a vocabulary that has about 5,000 words and a well-educated person knows about 10,000 words, it could be concluded that the Bible was not written for the normal everyday person. What say you????

I have to disagree, but with this qualification. The Bible was written to be read, and that presupposes a target audience that was able to read, and not illiterate as some will say. Each part of the Bible was written at a particular time and for particular purposes, including that of convincing readers or whatever was written. The King James Bible has been counted as 12,852 (http://godsview.com/), a number that I cannot deny or confirm. However, thatis in theoverall count. You would have to take each book by itself and check the vocabulary to determine at what level it was written, and that would hgave to be in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek as appropriate.

Could we consider that since Hebrew has an extremely small vocabulary, each word having a iwde range of meanings, but when translated into, say, English, with a vocabulary of over 500,000 words, and where subtle shades of meaning so not have to be garnered from the textual context, that the vocabulary of what was a simple monograph becomes exponentially enlarged? That is not the fault of the Bible, but arises from the nessecessity of the translator to make an alien text understandable.

Words beginning with the letter "A", in both Testaments, that occur but once, there are 337.

Of these, only 64 are not personal names.leaving 213 out of 337 that are personal names.

Of the 64, several are derivatives or grammatical extensions of common words. For example: ACCOMPANY, ACCOMPANYING, and ACCOMPLISHING, ACCOMPLISHMENT, and so forth.

Others, such as ANKLE and ANKLES do not require a special level of education to make them understandable, neither do words as, ACCEPTABLY, ACCEPTANCE, ACCEPTEST, or ACCEPTING. They were not unknown words. The only problem translators have is when they come across what are technically known as hapaxlegomenon. Linguistically such terms are part of almost all ancient records. Indeed they become a check on their age.

Hapaxlegomenon are terms which cannot be translated, only transliterated—that is, put into the sounds of a language but not into equivalent meanings of that language. Such documents as Bevelot, an ancient Anglo-Saxon epic poem, displays them often, as does the Bible in such a term as Zela, or Selah in Psalms. No one knows what zela or Selah means. Our best guess is that it's a musical notation—fortissimo, pianissimo, something like this, because it's only found in Biblical lyrics.

Were these ancients illiterate? The evidence speaks against that view. We know that the ancient Hebrews, like the Egyptians, wrote on leather, and from the Lachish seals, discovered in 1938, for the first time "we now know for certain that round about 600 b.c. papyrus was being commonly used as writing material in Judah." A private letter written in Hebrew on a copper plate has turned up and been dated to the twelfth century b.c.

To cite one specific example of how an ancient account can be preserved for centuries without leaving any written trace, even among literate people, the story of the two pieces of the coat of Joseph, related by Tha'labi (an Arab writing in the eleventh century A. D.), must have been passed on for more than sixteen centuries in the Near East, and even longer if it remounts historically to the actual event!

In regard to the Abraham story, Vermes assures us that "Genesis Apocryphon is securely established within the current of tradition whose origins, inherited eventually by targumic and midrashic literature, must derive from .an earlier age." However, it is acknowledged by schilares that the existence of writing in the Eastern Hemisphere has been traced as far back as 3,000 B. C.

Let us, however, assume that literacy although not universal was nonetheless present. One striking example of a people unable to read their own Biblical literature is presented by the return of the exiles from Babylon, and the solution to their problems is so simple that one must wonder how no one thinks of it for themselves. In military serice, I made a friend who could neither read nor write. I read his letters to him and then wrote his replies.

After seventy years in Babylonia, many of the returnees had beenborn in exile, and had only ever spoken Aramaic, a sister, or rather a cousin, language of Hebrew. Thus those who could read could not read their scriptures. But there were exceptions. Ezra, called the scribe for his skills in literacy, read the scriprures to the people, translating them into Aramaic as he went aloing.

There is no doubt except by skeptics unfamilar with the territory that the various documents that comprise the Bible, were literary productions intended to be read, and they spoke in a vocabuary and with a background that was immediately accessible to the ancient Israelites at each pioint in their history. Besides which, they were redacted as need arose to keep them pertinent to the situation of the congregation of Israel.

Because a word occurs only once in a document, does not mean that its meaning is either inaccedible or obscure to its readers.


MORGANITE

[bucker]

That is the amazing thing about the bible. Through all the atempts to distroy it, God has caused it to survive. And above all, He has kept it to a level of understanding for all people. We should never take just a word, and make a decesion. We must look at the subject, and what it is trying to say. The main thing to remember is this. It is the overall meaning of the word that counts. That is, what did Jesus say for us to do. How did He say we could be saved, and what we must do to stay saved. What is required of a Christian. Read what He did, and try our best to do the same. We could know the old Testiment, and be able to quote it, and still be lost. So the most important thing is to cling to the truth, and receive our promised salvation