Featured The KJV Quiz

Aarghh! I got several wrong. Two, maybe three, can't remember exactly. And I grew up on the KJV.

 

I got one "wrong." If I got it wrong, I am in good company because Macarthur in his commentary agrees with the "wrong" answer I chose.
The NASB seems to disagree with the quiz and J.Mac.

 

1 Kgs 18:21

 

That seemed a little like the "anti-KJV" quiz -- talking about false friends and the words don't mean the same today. "False friends" may be an apt term to capture the idea that folks generally may think the words mean something else. But it is not literally true, I don't think, to say the words don't mean the same today. Most all words have a range of meaning, and I'm pretty sure that in every one of the words they still carry that meaning as well. Just because some (or even a majority) don't know the range of meaning doesn't mean that it is not there.

I'm also skeptical of the answers for 1 Kings 18:21. To halt/limp between two opinions seems to be to hesitate, waver, yes, even vacillate (which was one of the choices in the quiz).

 

The consensus of modern translations indicate waver or its equivalent. The ESV being a notable exception.

 

7 out of 10. I will comfort myself with the fact I have only used the KJV for 5 years.

 

As did the ESV. Why I said consensus and not all.

 

From the book...

To halt wasn’t just to “stop” in 1611 (or in 1568 when the Bishops’ Bible used this very word); halt was the verb form of a word used in the KJV Gospels in the parable of the great banquet: “Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind” (Luke 14:21). Halt in 1611 meant “lame.” Instead of “how long halt ye,” we would say something like “hobble” or “limp.” And that’s exactly what the ESV has: “How long will you go limping between two different opinions?”

More important, this is what the Hebrew text has too. The Hebrew word underlying “limping” is the one used to describe what happened to Mephibosheth when his nurse dropped him as a young child, leaving him lame (2 Sam 4:4). Interestingly, the word also occurs again within 1 Kings 18, and the ESV uses the same English word it used in verse 21, creating a sarcastically mocking picture: The prophets of Baal “limped around the altar that they had made” (v. 26).

Elijah’s challenge to the people in 1 Kings 18:21 is a picturesque metaphor. An obscure one, to be sure, because the next phrase is not as clear as “between two opinions.” It’s literally something like “on two lopped-off boughs”—apparently crutches (this is the only time this word appears in the Old Testament). The whole phrase “describes a mind as wobbly and uncertain as the legs of someone lame.”

Mark Ward, Authorized: The Use & Misuse of the King James Bible, ed. Elliot Ritzema, Lynnea Fraser, and Danielle Thevenaz (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 32–33.

 

Vacillate was the best answer, despite what whoever concocted that quiz says.

Halt had a literal and figurative meaning:

halt | Origin and meaning of halt by Online Etymology Dictionary
Definition of HALT

intransitive verb
1: to walk or proceed lamely : limp
2: to be in a state of uncertainty or doubt between alternate courses or choices : waver

The scripture in the quiz was "How long halt ye between two opinions?"

I will not be buying the guy's advertised booklet!

 

Thanks!

At the moment I don't have anything to check to show otherwise, but I suspect that halt in in 1611 had a range of meaning beyond just "lame." Perhaps not. The Hebrew had a range of meaning broader than that (see below).

We just finished the 31st chapter of Isaiah last Sunday. Interestingly, this Hebrew word in 1 Kings 18:21,26 is the same word translated passing over in Isaiah 31:5 (and in Exodus 12).

IOW, vacillating?

 

It is interesting (to me at least) to notice how Wycliffe translated these verses. According to Bible Gateway, here is what he has (early version first and then the later version in parentheses)

1 Kings 18:21 Forsooth Elijah nighed to all the people of Israel, and said, How long halt ye into two parts? (How long shall ye waver between two paths?)
1 Kings 18:26 ...And no voice was, neither any that answered; and they skipped over the altar, which they had made. (...But there was no voice, nor anyone who answered; even as they leapt all around the altar, which they had made.)

 

Definition, Halt
1. to be lame, walk lame, limp (archaic)
2. to cease haltingly or hesitatingly from (a way of course); to fall away (obsolete)
3. To walk unsteady or hesitatingly; to waver, vacillate, oscillate; to remain in doubt. [first use cites this verse in Wycliffe (1382) and KJV (1611)]

Oxford English Dictionary

Sounds to me like the translators were paving the way for a new understanding of the word HALT.

Rob