TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 17: 42, Major word mistranslations or misunderstandings that occur repeatedly throughout the Bible, continued: Generations or Races?, Jew, Judah or Judaeans?, What is the World?

TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 17

Here we continue our discussion of point 42 in TruthVid’s 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White. While this review of the meanings of certain words does not explicitly prove the race of the Israelites, it does show that word meanings were obfuscated so as to distort the many other evidences that the message of Christ and His apostles and prophets is solely intended for White Europeans.

42 continued) Major word mistranslations or misunderstandings that occur repeatedly throughout the Bible.

Generations or Races?

In 1 Peter chapter 1 we read where Peter addressed his intended readers and called them: “the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia”. But that word stranger is not ξένος, which commonly referred to a stranger or foreigner. Neither is it ἀλλογενὴς, which refers to someone of another race – in a narrower sense than we use the term race, but which is translated as stranger in Luke chapter 17. Rather the word in 1 Peter chapter 1 is παρεπίδημος, which describes “one who comes from a foreign country into a city or land to reside there by the side of the natives”, which is a sojourner. This translation of different words with different meanings into the same English word, stranger, is also a source for confusion.

So the intended recipients of Peter’s epistle were people who were not always native to the lands where they were living. Then later in his epistle, in chapter 2, Peter says of them: “9 But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: 10 Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” In the verse which follows he again refers to them as sojourners and pilgrims.

But if that word, generation, always referred to all of the people alive at any given time, then according to Peter only the people of that generation were called to be the people of God. However the word translated as generation is γένος, which along with another similar word, γενεά, represents the source from which we get English terms such as gene, genetic and genealogy. The word γένος is literally a race, stock or family. In order for it to make sense in that passage from 1 Peter 2:9 it must be translated as race, since verse 10 is from a prophecy of Hosea, whereby Peter shows the fulfillment of a prophecy in his intended readers which relates only to the children of Israel. They were descendants of the children of Israel who were in the migrations and captivities of ancient times, and that is why he also called them sojourners.

Many times the words γένος and γενεά should have been translated as race instead of generation. But even in contexts where it should be read as generation, as the context is limited to a particular time, the concept of race cannot be removed from the meaning of the word, and it should be interpreted to refer to all of the people of a particular race who are alive at the time in which the context refers.

In fact, in English, perhaps until recent times, the word generation also means race, and that may well be the meainng which the King James translators had originally intended when they used it, at least on frequent occasions. In the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster under the entry for generation we read:

GENERA'TION, noun The act of begetting; procreation, as of animals.

1. Production; formation; as the generation of sounds or of curves or equations.

2. A single succession in natural descent, as the children of the same parents; hence, an age. Thus we say, the third, the fourth, or the tenth generation Genesis 15:16.

3. The people of the same period, or living at the same time.

O faithless and perverse generation Luke 9:41.

Now where Christ had said this in Luke chapter 9, He was not referring to the Romans, or to people living in far-away lands. Rather, He was referring to the Judaeans, and not to any other race. So even though the context may refer to the Judaeans at that time, it nevertheless only refers to the race found in Judaea which Christ was addressing. Continuing with Webster:

4. Genealogy; a series of children or descendants from the same stock.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. Genesis 5:1.

The generations of Adam are the descendants or collectively, the race of Adam. Now for the last two definitions of the word’s meaning:

5. A family; a race.

6. Progeny; offspring.

But these last definitions are not less significant. In fact, they are the products of the primary meaning of the term given at the beginning, which is the act of begetting; procreation. A generation is something which is generated, and of men and families of men, races are generated whether they be good or evil, or genuine or bastards.

Where Christ spoke to His adversaries in Luke chapter 11, he was referring to men and their ancestors both near and remote when He said: “50 That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; 51 From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.” So in that case, He must have meant race, not generation as we understand the term today, because the Law of God would not condemn men for crimes they themselves were not responsible for. However one can suffer the consequences of the crimes of one’s ancestors.

Going back to Peter’s epistle, the aspect of the prophecy which Peter cited in reference to the people of the provinces of Anatolia, which is found at the end of Hosea chapter 1, only pertains to the ten northern tribes of Israel, and not even to the people of Judah or Judaea. So that leads us to the next item in our discussion:

Jew, Judah or Judaeans?

It is unfortunate that the word Jew even appears in Scripture. In the Old Testament the appropriate word is Judah or Judahite. It could refer to a member of the tribe of Judah, and in some contexts may include people of Benjamin or the portion of Levi who were attached to Judah in the divided kingdom. So with that alone, the word Judah begins losing its meaning as a tribal distinction, and becoming a mere indication of geography or citizenship. But where the word Jew first appears in the King James Version of Scripture, in 2 Kings chapter 16, where the kingdom was divided, the word Jew appears in contradistinction to Israel. So even there, where the use of the word Jew is unfortunate, Jews were nevertheless distinguished from Israel: they are not one and the same, and no Israelite of the northern kingdom was ever called a Jew.

Among the Jews in the later period of the New Testament were a generation, or a race, of vipers (Matthew 3, 12, 23, Luke 3, 11). Among the Jews were serpents and scorpions (Luke 10). Among the Jews Christ had contrasted the “children of this world” and the “children of light” (Luke 16). Among the Jews were thorns and thistles contrasted with figs and grapes (Matthew 7, Luke 6). Among the Jews were wolves and sheep (Matthew 7, 10, Luke 10, John 10). Among the Jews were descendants of Cain, described as being a γενεά or race (Matthew 23, Luke 11). But among all nations there were only sheep and goats (Matthew 25). The goat throughout history has also often been a symbol for the devil.

How could this be, if the Jews were all Israelites, and if all Israel was promised salvation? All goats are destined for the Lake of Fire. The first problem to overcome is that term, Jew. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and 11 of the 12 patriarchs were not Judah, and they were never called Jews until the Jews themselves started insisting that they were Jews. At least 9 of the 12 tribes, and most of two others, were never called after the name Judah, and could not possibly be called Jews. None of them were ever called Jews until modern times, but that label could never be properly applied to most of them. Only a deceiver would want to go back in history and change someone’s identity, so that he could commit his own identity theft.

The name Jew is an abbreviated form of the name Judaea, and Judaea, or more properly Ioudaia, was the Greek name for the society of the people in Jerusalem in the Hellenistic period. While it came from Judah, and while the land of Judah is sometimes translated in the Septuagint as Ἰουδαία, Ioudaia, Judaea being from the modern Anglicized version of the Lain equivalent, Judah and Judaea are not one and the same. Judah being left only sparsely populated after the Assyrian and Babylonian deportations of its people, only 42,000 people returned with Zerubbabel in 520 BC, and a few thousand more with Ezra a few decades later. Those people initially settled only in and around Jerusalem and Galilee. After about 350 years, they grew into a formidable nation, and ultimately having gained their independence, came to subjugate many of the surrounding people, which was also their ultimate undoing because they forced those surrounding people, mostly Edomites and Canaanites, to adopt and conform to Judaism.

While this is explained in detail in Book 13 of Antiquities of the Judaeans by Flavius Josephus, here we will see it from Book 16, chapter 2 of Strabo’s Geography: “2 We set down as parts of Syria, beginning at Cilicia and Mt. Amanus, both Commagenê and the Seleucis of Syria, as the latter is called; and then Coelê-Syria, and last, on the seaboard, Phoenicia, and in the interior, Judaea. Some writers divide Syria as a whole into Coelo-Syrians and Syrians and Phoenicians, and say that four other tribes are mixed up with these, namely, Judaeans, Idumaeans, Gazaeans, and Azotians, and that they are partly farmers, as the Syrians and Coelo-Syrians, and partly merchants, as the Phoenicians.” The reference to Phoenicians here is merely a reference to the inhabitants of Phoenicia, and most of the original Phoenicians, which were the Israelites, were taken off in the Assyrian captivity several hundred years before. Coelo-Syria, the prefix coming from a Greek word which means hollow, was actually the Greek name for a swath of land north of Judaea, extending from the Lebanon Mountains northwest to include Damascus and much of modern Syria as far as the Euphrates River. In Palestine, Judaea was situated to the south and west of Coelo-Syria. So perhaps there Strabo was referring to Judaeans who remained near Babylonia after the captivity, but who never returned to Jerusalem, and here he attests that they were also mingled with Edomites and other races.

Then further on in the same chapter of Geography he wrote: “34 As for Judaea, its western extremities towards Casius are occupied by the Idumaeans and by the lake. The Idumaeans are Nabataeans, but owing to a sedition they were banished from there, joined the Judaeans, and shared in the same customs with them.” Actually, the Edomites and Nabataeans, who were originally Ishmaelites, dwelt in proximity of one another and intermingled until the Edomites had migrated northwards in the aftermath of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of Judah, most of Judah having been left vacant.

This testimony encapsulates a much broader narrative found in Josephus’ Antiquities, where Josephus, being an insider, supplied much more historic detail. The Edomites and other Canaanite tribes coming to inhabit much of the former land of Judah and Israel after the captivities, once the Hasmonaeans, also called the Maccabees, had gained their independence from the Greeks then they began trying to drive out all of the other tribes from the former lands of Israel and Judaea. But after failing to accomplish that for several decades, they began converting them instead, and pressured all of them to convert.

Then several decades later, when the Romans had come conquered Jerusalem and drew up the lines for a kingdom, which they rewarded to Herod the Edomite, it kept the name Judaea. But it was not truly Judah, and most of the inhabitants were not of Judah regardless of their religion. Yet, as they converted to Judaism, and as they lived in the Roman province of Judaea, they were from that time always known as Judaeans, regardless of their race. In Jerusalem, after the Edomite Herod became king, which office he had for over 30 years, and his sons succeeded him in the government for several generations after him, the Edomites became established in all of the areas of authority over the people, and especially in the priesthood.

So with all of this, if Christ had said to His opponents “But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you”, and if He later warned Christians that “I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan”, then how do we imagine that the Jews are Judah? And how could we possibly imagine at all that the Jews are Israel or that the patriarchs were Jews? If Jew or Jewry were also properly translated as Judah or Judahite in the Old Testament, and if Ἰουδαία was always translated as Judaea, and Ἰουδαῖος as Judaean, then we would not have gotten the ancient Israelites so easily confused with Jews, which is a lie that emanates from the Jews themselves.

Another, and perhaps the most critical, of the misunderstandings of word meanings in the Bible is the word world.

What is the World?

Three Greek words in the New Testament which are commonly translated as world in English: αἰών (aeon), κόσμος (cosmos), and οἰκουμένη (oikoumene). Denominational churches, wherever these words appear and are translated as world, insist that they mean the entire planet and everything or everyone on it. That was not the understanding of the ancient Greeks, and it is the meaning of these words to Greek readers in the first century which is how Christians should understand them, the way the apostles also understood them.

The first word, αἰών (165) is “a period of existence...one’s lifetime, life...an age, generation...a long space of time, an age, a definite space of time, an era, epoch, age, period...hence its usage in plural, εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας for ever...” (Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon [L&S]). A related word αἰώνιος (166) is “lasting for an age...everlasting, eternal...” (L&S). According to Strong’s Concordance, these words were rendered world(s) a total of 42 times in the King James Version (the King James Version) of the New Testament. These words have to do with a period of time and not a place. As we shall see below, the original meaning of the term world was also related to time, and not a place. But the general perception of the word's meaning today relates to the planet itself, and not a time. Rendering αἰών and αἰώνιος, which always have a temporal sense in Greek, as world, which today is most often perceived with a spatial sense in English, can create serious misconceptions in the interpretation of scripture.

The next word is κόσμος (2889), which appears approximately 182 times in the New Testament, with 85% of those occurrences being in John and in Paul (Moulton-Geden, Concordance to the Greek Testament). The related verb, κοσμέω (2885), is “to order, arrange...to deck, adorn, equip, furnish, dress....” Liddell & Scott define κόσμος as “order... good order, good behaviour, decency...the form, fashion of a thing...of states, order, government... II. an ornament, decoration, embellishment, dress... III. a regulator...IV. the world or universe, from its perfect order...mankind, as we use ‘the world’, N.T.” This last definition deserves further scrutiny, where L&S show how the various New Testament translators and commentators perceive the term’s meaning.

First, of the other words translated world in the King James Version, αἰών and αἰώνιος, are literally age and lasting for an age, temporal and not spatial terms, and that in itself may give further insight into the flexibility of the definition of world in the King James Version translators’ minds, especially once the original meaning of the word itself is examined. Second, there is another word translated world that does indeed explicitly refer to a geographic area, and that is οἰκουμένη. Once we understand what οἰκουμένη means, then perhaps we can perceive κόσμος as the Greeks did.

Liddell & Scott define οἰκουμένη, which appears in the New Testament approximately 15 times, as “the inhabited world, a term used to designate the Greek world, as opposed to barbarian lands...so in Roman times, the Roman world....” Strabo, the geographer, who died about 25 A.D. and who therefore wrote not long before Paul, described the οἰκουμένη in his 17-book Geography. It included practically all of the lands inhabited by the White races - and not only the Romans, but the Parthians, Scythians and others of Asia, and all of northern Africa. Diodorus Siculus, writing about 40 B.C., referred to the lands about India as the “limits of the inhabited world” (τῆς οἰκουμένης) in his Library of History, at 1.19.7. This was the οἰκουμένη - the physical world which the race of Adam inhabited (Deut. 32:8; Acts 17:26) - the physical world in spite of the fact that Strabo, Diodorus and others knew very well of lands - inhabited by alien tribes – both in Africa to the south and to the east of India - which were not considered a part of the οἰκουμένη, nor could they be included in a perception of the κόσμος.

It should be quite evident that if the οἰκουμένη was the portion of the physical world inhabited by Adamic man (and note the use of the word at Luke 2:1, where it clearly denotes only the Roman portion of that), the κόσμος describes the order, decorum, and arrangement of the οἰκουμένη. While the οἰκουμένη was the physical world, the κόσμος was its society and its embellishment. Of course, the heavenly bodies were considered by the Greeks and Romans to be only another part of that embellishment, and much more a part of their world than we perceive them to be of ours today. Support for this idea that κόσμος is society is found in the May-June 2004 issue of Archaeology Odyssey, on p. 26 in an article entitled “Is Homer Historical?” by one Gregory Nagy, and while I can’t agree with all of the author’s opinions concerning Homer and his writings, the definition of κόσμος found in the article on p. 31 is a good one, where he explains that to the Spartans, the κόσμος was the sum total of their government and their social order – their society.

This is certainly a far departure from the universalist theologian’s view of the world as the planet and everyone in it, which is surely not an accurate view when compared with the ancient texts. Yet by necessity, in the Biblical context I must understand the word to refer to the society in the sense of Adamic society. It is even apparent that the way in which the King James Version translators understood the word world is itself quite different than how we understand it today.

If we investigate the word world in the American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd Edition, we find that it derives from an Old and Middle English word, weorold, and we are referred to an entry for a supposed proto-Indo-European word (wi-ro) in their appendix of “Indo-European Roots”. When we check this entry, we find that the word world comes from the Germanic word wer, akin to the Latin vir, for man, and the Germanic ald, which is a life or an age (from which we get our word old), and that put together the word world means only age of man. Therefore, originally, world is a temporal and not a spatial term! It means to refer to our Adamic age, and it does not mean everyone and everything on the planet, or the planet itself! Our confusion over the meaning of this word has led us into total confusion when attempting to understand our own literature, especially our Bibles!

The world is not the planet and all that it contains – not even in English, and certainly not in our Bibles! Martin Luther, in Chapter 13 of his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, uses the word equivalent to world to describe only what could have been the White European world when he said “It is a great, extraordinary, and wonderful thing that the Gentiles in all the world accepted, without sword or coercion, with no temporal benefits accruing to them, gladly and freely, a poor Man of the Jews as the true Messiah, one whom his own people had crucified, condemned, cursed, and persecuted without end.”

The world is the age of Adamic man, and it should be nothing else, because it is only the (White) Adamic nations which Yahweh our God concerned Himself with throughout our Bibles, as evidenced in Genesis Chapter 10, Deuteronomy 32:8, Luke 2:1 and Acts 17:26! But even more precisely, we see the children of Israel alone are the world of the Scriptures where we read in the Wisdom of Solomon chapter 18: “24 For in the long garment was the whole world, and in the four rows of the stones was the glory of the fathers graven, and thy Majesty upon the diadem of his head.” In other words, the world of the Bible is only the world of the children of Israel, as they were to become many nations, and as it says in reference to God in Isaiah chapter 28, “6 He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.”