Learning the Language

And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language, but according to the language of each people, Nehemiah 13:24.

The logical thing to do here if we listen to the modern apologists for the new versions is to write bibles in the language of these children. Nehemiah thought otherwise. And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves, Nehemiah 13:25.

"Whoa there" you might say, "Nehemiah is attacking the Jews intermarriage with other faiths and people." You would be right. The point made in verse 24 is that the speech of the children was the evidence that their fathers had strayed from the faith. One of the great distinguishing factors that identify any given culture is the language that they use.

Religious Jews teach their children Hebrew regardless of what language they use in their own homes or while interacting in the country wherein they live. Why? One factor is cultural identity, but more importantly, they see it as a duty. They simply believe that the Hebrew scriptures that they carry are the living words of the living God and that God has protected them. As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever, Isaiah 59:21.

Is there any person familiar with the evolution of languages as they slowly change and adapt over the years who really believes that they could go back to the year 1026 and be understood by an English speaking person? It may well be that a tribe on a remote island which has never had interactions with other cultures may have a largely unchanged language after a thousand years, but no language spoken by any people has survived intact as a spoken language when those people inhabit the crossroads of trade or conquest.

Why would anyone think that the Hebrew spoken on the streets or in the homes would be the same in Nehemiah's time as it was 1000 years earlier in the days of Moses? It wasn't. Already , at the times of the judges, the Hebrew spoken in one tribe had begun to diverge from the language of another tribe. Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand, Judges 12:6.

How then did Hebrew survive until today? It survived until today because the people revered the word of God and trusted God to preserve it. They taught that language to their children as it was written in their text regardless of how they spoke it at home or in the streets.

I have been a prolific reader for most of my life. Regardless of whether I was reading an historical text, a light novel, science fiction, or whatever, books written prior to 1960 were liberally sprinkled with biblical references out of the King James Bible. By no means were the authors of these books universally people of faith. They just knew that to quote a King James Bible was quote a source that the greatest number of people would recognize.

Then we stopped teaching our children to read King James English. The excuse was that it was no longer the language of their homes or of their culture. It was explained to us that if our children could learn the word of God in a language more comfortable to their ears that they would learn it better. How's that working out?

The drive to get children to read and understand the bible better by rewriting it in more relevant language is by far the greatest failure of a social experiment in the last 50 years. For a moment, think of the traditional American family or neighborhood. I realize that most countries have a large influx of people from other cultures. I'm not criticizing that here.

I merely want you to think of the traditional homes and communities still attempting to carry on as they always have. The majority of such people have less bible knowledge than at any time since before the time of William Tyndale. Their children know less.

I have often spoken of my years ministering in Allegany County, New York. The state of New York which has an overall good academic record, does worse when they try to educate children in poor rural counties. As an example, the local public school where I ministered has never had a child accepted to an Ivy League school.

When I first began to minister among them, I discovered quickly that they were uncomfortable reading and preferred not to. If it wasn't on YouTube or TikTok, it wasn't for them. I taught them out of a King James Bible. I taught them to read it. I watched as their homes and lives changed. I watched as their speech patterns matured and they learned to converse as if they were well educated.

Among those Jews in the days of Nehemiah who taught their children the speech of the Jews, they used a central unmoveable standard. They used their Hebrew Bible. Regardless of how they spoke in their homes or on the streets, those children had the eternal touchstone of their culture. They had an archaic bible written in an archaic language that they kept alive.

As has been repeated here over and over, there was never a time when any people spoke King James English. If you read Shakespeare who was contemporary with the King James translators and whose livelihood depended on connecting with the average man on the streets, only one third of his verbs end in the "th" as do King James Verbs.

From its onset, the King James Bible has been apart from common speech. It was written in a highly inflected form of speech which mirrored Greek and Hebrew in its verbs, nouns, and pronouns which were constructed to make them conform as happens in Greek and Hebrew. For over 300 years, school children were taught how to read it. There is simply no comparison to the general knowledge people had of the bible in those days and what they know today.

I have never met a person who was worse off when he learned that a besom was a broom. I have never met a person who wasn't able to learn that a shambles was an outdoor market place. I have never met a person who was not better off when they expanded their vocabulary to be able to read older outdated words and to intersperse them in their own vocabulary.

If I were to enumerate the various social experiments that sound so golden on the tongues of their proponents but have wrought social havoc wherever they are implemented, the drive to get our young to read modern versions must be counted among them.