Animal translations and the KJV

A major flaw in the KJVOnly ideology is the fact that perfection in translation, especially with imperfectly equivalent languages, is actually impossible. Nowhere is this seen more than when the Bible speaks about animals. Hebrew language and culture both identified and classified animals in a completely different way than modern, or even Old English.

An excellent example is the Behemoth. Commitment to the purity of the KJV is excellent motive for KJVOnlyists to have otherwise pure doctrine, meaning KJVOnlyists tend to be Creationists. As a result, it's not uncommon for them to agree with the identification of the Behemoth in Job 40 as a sauropod dinosaur. But there's obviously a problem here. When the KJV was translated, not only was there no word for dinosaur, but no accurate concept of them either.

So what did the KJV translators do? Rather than translate, they transliterated. That is, it's the identical word, but written in a different alphabet. Now, if the KJV is a good translation, that makes sense. It's free from error, it gets the main point across, it just falls slightly short of perfectly identifying the animal in question.

The same is the case for the re'em, which in the KJV is translated "unicorn". Modern readers come across this word and are a little taken back. Atheists use this to mock the Bible as being a book of fairy tales. Even many believers are troubled by this. Of course, this is no problem at all in reality, if you understand what's really going on here. The actual identification of this particular animal has been lost to history. We have some good guesses, but no unanimous understanding. The KJV not only falls short of correctly identifying the animal, but identifies it in a way that seems absurd to most modern readers. There is an extra step involved here that would not be needed for the original audience.

By contrast, a truly perfect translation would identify the identical animal. The KJV does this with other animals. Dog, lion, ostrich, just to name a few. We don't read "Cerberus" or "manticore". So let's say, as I believe, the "unicorn" is actually a rhino. What were rhinos called back in the 17th century? Rhinos... Know what unicorn meant in the 1600s? This picture from 1605 should tell you everything you need to know:

To put this into perspective, imagine a Bible that, rather than talking about the risen Lord, spoke of Him as a member of the undead. Undead, etymologically speaking, sounds like a fair way to describe resurrection. He was dead, He is no longer dead, undead isn't entirely problematic. That is, until you realise most people these days will associate the word "undead" with zombies, vampires, and other forms of necromancy. Obviously, this would be problematic, since the Bible doesn't speak highly of such cursed things.

Now, thankfully, the KJV does not do this. But if it did, I'm not sure the KJVOnly movement would get as far as it has. Everyone would be realistically expected to just let a new, updated translation spread. There would be nothing wrong with the older one, it just wouldn't be ideal. In the same way, there's nothing wrong with the KJV identifying an animal as a "unicorn", it's just a lot easier if we use different translations.

The point of a translation is to take the thought from one language and express it in another. A truly perfect translation would do so in as clear a manner as the original, with the new audience needing no more explanation than the original audience/s. No translation needs to be perfect, it simply needs to preserve the thought. The way in which all Bibles fail to perfectly translate animals shows that there is no perfect Bible translation. Not the KJV, not the NIV, no Bible translation is perfect. But the good news is, it doesn't have to be. All reputable translations preserve the original meaning, allowing an English speaking Christian to have the same doctrines as a Greek or Hebrew speaking Christian. We may never be able to definitively prove that Behemoth is a dinosaur, nor remember what, exactly, a re'em is, but we will never lose the word of God, even if every KJV on the Earth suddenly evaporated.