Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Harry Rimmer (Protestant) Appealing to the Bible being Correct "As Far as it is Translated Correctly" on Science and the Bible

 

 

While every infidel knows, this English mistranslation of the words of Isaiah, we have never found one of them honest enough to refer to the only text in the book of Isaiah where the prophet did speak about the shape of the earth. This is in Isaiah 40:22, where the prophet writes concerning the greatness and the magnitude of God, “It is he that sitteth above the circle of the earth.” Again, we must note that the word, “circle”, is a translation of a Hebrew word that literally means “roundness”. The most literal translation from the Hebrew into a vernacular text that we have found on this point is that of the modern Swedish translation. In place of the word “circle”, the Swedish version uses the word “rund”, which is a literal rendition of the ideas of Isaiah. (Harry Rimmer, The Harmony of Science and Scripture [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1936], 77)

 

In the King James version of the New Testament there is an incorrect translation that makes this fish appear as a whale. Jesus did not say that Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly. The translators, in dealing with this passage in the original Greek, used the word “whale” because it was the only sea creature they knew that was big enough to suit them. The word, however, is “ketos”—and simply means a monster of the deep. The Hebrew word for whale is “tannin”. The Old Testament Scripture says that Jonah was swallowed by a great “dag”. The New Testament says that he was picked up by a “ketos”, and nowhere does the original writing say that this was a whale. (Ibid., 177-78)