The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Biblical Errors

Some people say that the Bible is the revealed word of God, which would imply that God spoke English. There’s even a society in America that believes the King James Version was given to mankind by divine revelation, and it has a big ceremony once a year in which other versions of the Bible are piled up and burnt.

It’s certainly true that the King James Version was a lot more accurate than Myles Coverdale’s attempt of a hundred years before. Myles Coverdale was an early Protestant who believed in principle that the Bible should be translated into English. He decided that, as nobody else seemed to be doing it, he had better get on with the job himself, and he didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.

Coverdale did know a bit of German, though, and the Germans, who had invented Protestantism, had already started preparing their own translation. Coverdale threw himself into his work and produced a Psalter that is still used in Church of England services today. It is, though, much more beautiful than it is accurate. For example, he has the line:

It’s beautiful and mysterious. Who are the strange children? What’s so strange about them? And what on earth are they doing in prison? The answer is that the line should be translated as:

But the best of Coverdale’s mistranslations is about Joseph, whose neck, we are told in Psalm 105, was bound in iron. The problem is that Hebrew uses the same word for neck as it does for soul. The word is nefesh, and it usually means neck or throat, but it can mean breath (because you breathe through your neck), and it can also mean soul, because the soul is the breath of life. (You have the same thing in Latin and English with spirit and respiratory.)

If Coverdale had made only one mistake, English would have been given the phrase, His soul was put in iron. But Coverdale was never a man to make one mistake when two would do; so he mixed up the subject and the object and came up with the wonderfully inappropriate and nonsensical: The iron entered into his soul.

And yet somehow that phrase works. It may have nothing to do with the original Hebrew, but Coverdale’s phrase was so arresting that it caught on. Nobody cared that it was a mistranslation. It sounded good.

Even if the translation of the Bible gets it right, English-speakers can still get it wrong. Strait, these days, is usually used to describe a narrow stretch of water like the Bering Straits or the Straits of Gibraltar, but, if you think about it, other things can be strait. Straitjackets are small jackets used to tie up lunatics. People who are too tightly laced-up are strait-laced. If a gate is hard to get through, then it’s a strait gate, and the hardest gate to pass through is the gate that leads to heaven:

Which is why it’s not the straight and narrow but the strait and narrow.

Finally, the salt of the earth is a biblical phrase that has managed to almost reverse its meaning. These days, the salt of the earth are the common folk, the working men and women, the ordinary Joes on the Clapham omnibus; but if that were the case, then the earth would be much too salty to taste good.

When Jesus invented the phrase the salt of the earth, he meant exactly the opposite. The world was filled with sinners and pagans, and the only reason that God didn’t destroy it utterly was that the few people who believed in Him were like salt to earth’s stew.

This is strange, as Jesus was later crucified by a bunch of Roman salt-men.