>
> >
> > The Bible certainly makes no bones about
> > comdemning witchcraft; there's no such thing
> > as a "good witch" in Scripture. The old
> > testament law said that "thou shalt not suffer a
> > witch to live" (Ex. 22:19)
>
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, people. I have a friend who's considering becoming a wiccan, and she's looked up a few sites, given me the URLs to the ones she thought presented it in an unprejudiced way. Anyway, what I've heard is that that line originally, in the Hebrew or whatever, read 'thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live.' It was changed by King James, who was apparently paranoid about magic, witches, supernatural powers, so on, in the King James Bible. Are there any Bible experts out there who could tell me if this is pure rumor? It sounds reasonable to me.
>
> SilverMoon

I can't tell you for sure, but I'll research it and get back to you if you don't find the answer yourself or if someone else doesn't beat me to it. However, before you stop reading because you think I'm not going to point out something relevant, I do want to point out some things about translation that might come in handy.

First of all, translation is not an exact business. Sometimes words don't have exact equivalents, and it is possible that this particular Hebrew word is one of those. If this was the case, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible would have used what might be referred to as an approximate equivalent. Poisoner and Witch might have been similar concepts to the men of the 1600's. It doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to connect the two.

Second, often in translating other laguages you come upon a figure of speech that doesn't translate directly into the other language. An example might be when the bible speaks of someone "laying" with someone else. If you are familiar with King James terminology, you understand the implication that this is making. However, if you have never heard this before then you might not understand that this is talking about sexual relations. This can happen in word roots as well. One that comes to mind is the word "faithfulness" that came up in one of my studies recently. In looking at the greek word that this originated from you would find that if you translate the word directly with its root and its prefixes and suffixes you would come out with something similar to "unsavedness", which to our mind doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context that it is used. However, when you study the evolution of the word from its previous forms you will understand that it is referring to the way a person doesn't hold anything from another person. He is wholly devoted to that person, or loyal, as we might more commonly refer to it. This could be the case with "witch/witchcraft" as well. In the Hebrew, the word for poisoner could have been a common colloquialism or slang for "witch". The Hebrews would have understood it both ways, but when translating it, the King James translators would have had to make it a little more apparent to the English speaking readers.

Shan-Learning Greek is fun!-dar