iainduguid
Puritan Board Junior
In neither case to which I pointed here is the text uncertain. The question is one of what the proper translation is.I just looked these passages up out of curiosity. Interestingly, the KJV translators offer alternate translations in the margins in both instances. For Ps 122:1, the marginal note reads, "Or, Shall I lift up mine eyes to the hills? Whence should my help come?"
For Prov 29:18, they offer "is made naked" in the place of "perish."
The first part of Psalm 122:1 is unlikely to be a question (though like many languages, including English, Hebrew can have unmarked questions), but the second part must be a question, based on the usage of me'ayin everywhere else in Scripture. It's not an adequate answer simply to say "Well, the KJV translators were godly men, with a unique knowledge of Hebrew, so they alone got this right, even though no modern scholar can explain why this is the right translation."
Likewise, with Proverbs 29:18 "made naked" is no better than "perish". What does it even mean for a people to be "made naked"?
Both examples illustrate my point: there are things that I can do easily (look up all the other uses of me'ayin and the niphal of pr' in the Old Testament), as well as parallel forms in cognate languages, that they couldn't possibly have imagined doing. As a result, they ended up leaning on the Vulgate to aid their translation, and going in the wrong direction.
Again, I'm not arguing that the KJV is a bad translation and that no one should read it. There are responsible arguments in favor of it that have been advanced in this thread. But the suggestion that the KJV is perfect and we must therefore accept that it is entirely without flaw as a translation - and that we should correct our Hebrew lexicons to match it! - is frankly untenable.