TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 21: 43, Specific OT Verse misteachings, mistranslations or corruptions, Genesis and Deuteronomy

TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 21

Having finally finished with Proof 42 and our discussion of words which are generally mistranslated or misunderstood throughout the Bible, now we turn to particular passages where certain words are mistranslated or misunderstood, which also adversely affect the interpretation of the Scriptures throughout the entire Bible.

43) Specific OT Verse misteachings, mistranslations or corruptions

Genesis 2:9

The first misteaching, of course, is not to properly recognize the allegories of Genesis chapters 2 and 3, even if they cannot be fully understood until Christ explained them in the parables and visions of the Gospel and Revelation. In Genesis chapter 2 there are two trees which are different from all the other trees. All of the actual wooden trees created by God were made to come out of the ground, and they were made to be good for food, but two other trees are mentioned apart from those trees, as we first read in that same chapter: “9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

Throughout Scripture trees are used as allegories for races or nations of people. But later, in the Gospel, Christ identifies the Tree of Life where He says in John chapter 15: “1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. 2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. 3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.” Proclaiming that He is the “true vine” also reveals the possibility that there is a spurious vine.

Later, in the Revelation, where the City of God is described, having inscribed on its gates the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel, we see language in chapter 21 which evokes the promise of a new covenant as it was made to the children of Israel in Ezekiel chapter 37: “3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” Yahshua Christ is that tabernacle, the temple of God mentioned in the Gospels.

Then in Revelation chapter 22 we see another allegorical description: “1 And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: 4 And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.” There it is apparent that the twelve manner of fruits on the Tree of Life are also the twelve tribes of the children of Israel.

But while the Tree of Life which was mentioned in Genesis is found in the Revelation, after all of the enemies of God have been destroyed and after the beast, the false prophet, the devil and all of his angels and all of the goat nations have been cast into the Lake of Fire, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil mentioned in Genesis is not found in the Revelation. This is in spite of the fact that those entering into the city “are they that do His commandments”, so they will still be cognizant of the law which teaches good and evil. So it is apparent, that if the Tree of Life is an allegory for a race of people, then the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is also an allegory for a race of people, and we see in Revelation chapter 12 that the leader of the fallen angels is one and the same with “that old serpent” of Genesis chapter 3. In that we find that the identity of the Nephilim, or fallen ones, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is elucidated.

Once again, Adam was given a single law, not to eat of that tree. Yet in the parable of Genesis chapter 3, he ate of the tree, following his wife, and he was punished with death even if the sentence was not immediately executed. Cain committed murder, but he was not executed according to the law, since there was not yet a law given against murder, as Paul later said in Romans chapter 5, sin was in the world, but sin was not imputed where there is no law. So when the Nephilim took wives of the daughters of Adam, the entire Adamic race was again punished with death, and the sentence was immediately executed except that the preservation of Noah it was ensured that the Word of God in those opening chapters of Genesis would not fail. It must be, that the Adamic people of Genesis chapter 6 had broken the same law as their first father Adam, in order for them to have justly been punished. So this is another way that the identity of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is revealed.

To understand this better, it is necessary to understand that where the phrase “sons of God” appears here in the Masoretic Text, in Enoch literature describing the saqme account it is “sons of heaven”, and in some manuscripts of the Septuagint, it is merely “angels”. In any case, Adam is the son of God, these giants are Nephilim, which is the word for giants here, and a race-mixing event is being described which led to the destruction of the race of Adam as punishment, save only Noah and his family.

A third way to identify the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is found in the parable of the tares of the field in Matthew chapter 13,as the tares are a plant sown by the devil, and the parable of the net in that same place lends further support to that interpretation as it reveals that there are good and bad races of people, where Yahweh God created nothing which was bad. So in our understanding, all of these pieces being stitched together create a perfect tapestry which pictures precisely what the Scripture is teaching, and explains mundane things, such as how there could be any law against fornication, or any pursuit of strange flesh, as Jude describes it, if all races had come from Adam in the first place. Yet there are such laws because only one race comes from Adam, and the others are all branches on the tree of those rebellious angels, the Nephilim.

Genesis 4:1

This particular verse is the only verse in Scripture where it is implied, but not proven, that Adam had fathered Cain. Yet there are many other circumstances and verses in Scripture that indicate that Adam did not father Cain, and assert that Cain was actually fathered by the serpent or devil. So it is not right to insist that Adam was the father of Cain with only a single witness, while there are multiple witnesses which refute that insistence. Adam was only Cain’s father because upon his having accepted Eve, he accepted responsibility for Cain, just as the angel of Yahweh encouraged Joseph to accept Mary when she was conceived of the Christ, so Joseph accepted responsibility for the Christ child. In fact, the ancient Christian work known as the Protevangelion of James makes that very same analogy in the very same context.

But the fact that the Hebrew of Genesis 4:1 is corrupt has been acknowledged by at least some mainstream denominational scholars. To quote a paper on the subject by Clifton Emahiser:

The Interpreter’s Bible, a twelve volume collaborative work of 36 ‘consulting editors’, plus 124 other ‘contributors’, makes the following observation on this verse, vol. 1, page 517:

“Cain seems originally to have been the ancestor of the Kenites ... The meaning of the name is ‘metalworker’ or ‘smith’; here, however, it is represented as a derivation of a word meaning ‘acquire’, ‘get’ — one of the popular etymologies frequent in Genesis — hence the mother’s words I have gotten a man. ‘From the Lord’ (KJV) is a rendering, following the LXX and Vulg., of ’eth Yahweh, which is literally, ‘with Yahweh’, and so unintelligible here (the help of [RSV] is not in the Hebrew). It seems probable that ’eth should be ’oth — so, ‘the mark of Yahweh’ — and that the words are a gloss ...”

Yet they are only conjecturing that the word ‘eth is a gloss, as they cannot prove it, and Clifton also protests that claim below. It is more likely that there was a greater corruption in this verse than the one word. So Clifton continues:

Secondly, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary On The Bible, edited by Charles M. Laymon, makes the following comment on this passage, on page 6: “... under circumstances which are obscure (vs. 1b can scarcely be translated, still less understood). His younger brother was named Abel, which suggests the Hebrew word for breath.”

Therefore, if Genesis 4:1 is “unintelligible” and “can scarcely be translated, still less understood”, how can one prove anything by quoting it? Additionally, if the words are a gloss, where is the foundation for such a premise? It should then be quite obvious that we need to look somewhere else for the answer. Fortunately, we do have other sources, but there are those who refuse to allow them in spite of the corrupted Hebrew.

Admittedly, the Interpreter’s Bible contributors have a problem with only 4:1b, which is the second part of Genesis 4:1. However the authors of the Aramaic Targums, which are among some of the earliest interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures, also had problems with the verse, so they made what are apparently their own elaborations in order to try to correct it. So we read at Genesis 4:1 in one such targum, the Targum Onkelos: “And Adam knew Hava his wife, who had desired the Angel; and she conceived, and bare Kain; and she said,I have acquired a man, the Angel of the Lord.” Similarly, the Aramaic Targum known as pseudo-Jonathan reads: “And Adam knew that his wife Eve had conceived from Sammael the Angel (of death) and she became pregnant and bore Cain. And he was like those on high and not like those below. And she said: ‘I have got a man from the angel of the LORD.’” While we do not agree that either of these readings is correct or accurate, they certainly do represent an early awareness that there are problems with Genesis 4:1 as it exists in the versions based on the Masoretic Text, such as the King James Version, and even in the Septuagint.

But concerning the Septuagint, in a 3rd century AD work known as the Hexapla, the Alexandrian Christian scholar Origen had compiled 6 versions of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek and set them in columns side-by-side. Represented were the Hebrew, then a transliteration of Hebrew words into Greek, the Septuagint, and versions by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. While no complete edition of Origen’s Hexapla survive, in Clifton Emahiser’s aforementioned article, we have an image from page 126 of Volume 1 of the 1875 edition of the fragments of the work by Fridericus Fields which was published by Oxford University’s Clarendon Press. Fields’ work also added an early Latin translation.

So what follows is Fields’ presentation of Genesis 4:1b based on the surviving fragments:

Latin: “I got a man to help Yahweh.” [Jova]

First Greek reading: “I have acquired a man through [by] God.” (Presence of a definite article indicates "the God", or a particular God.)

Second Greek reading: “The Hebrew and Syriac: I have acquired a man with [or by] a god.” (Lack of a definite article would indicate that it is referencing no particular god, so here there is an indefinite article added.)

Third Greek reading: “I have acquired a man with a lord.” (Again, there is no definite article, so in our translation there is no definite Lord, but an indefinite article was added.)

Fourth Greek reading: “I have acquired a man, a lord.” (The two nouns each being singular and in the accusative case with no prepositions, they are both the object of the verb, and therefore they each describe the same object, a man who is a lord.)

While these readings do not directly support the entire thesis which Clifton had presented in regard to this verse in his Genesis 4:1 paper, they do support the assertion that the text of Genesis 4:1 was rather problematic to the earliest translators of the Hebrew into Greek, just as the writers of the Aramaic Targums, which are also interpretations of the Hebrew, had similar problems and tried to rectify those problems.

So even though these are all interpretations of the second half of Genesis 4:1, we see that the Greek is divided, that Eve may have proclaimed that she had Cain through or by or with God, meaning Yahweh, or through or by some other god, or with some lord, or even a man who was a lord. This is also a reflection of the same problem with this verse that the modern Hebrew translators of the Interpreter’s Bible explain in recent times. If the original language of Genesis 4:1 is corrupt, then we can never determine what it actually said, and we can only begin guessing.

Furthermore, where Abel was called the brother of Cain, that does not mean that Adam was the father of Cain. They shared the same mother, and there is no word for half-brother in Hebrew or Greek. There are many other occasions in Scripture where a half-brother or half-sister is simply called brother or sister.

Therefore it is not a reliable witness of the identity of the father of Cain, and we should instead understand who had fathered Cain according to the words of Christ, where He spoke to His adversaries and said in John 8:44: “44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Only Cain was a murderer from the beginning, but being a murderer did not make him a devil, as there were many murderers in Scripture, even King David, and they were never called devils. Where it says “and the father of it” at the end of the verse, the Greek may just as correctly be read “and his father”, referring to Cain’s true father, who was a devil. If Cain was a devil, it is because his real father was the devil, and kind begets kind. As the apostle John had later written in chapter 3 of his first epistle: “11 For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. 12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.” What evil works had Cain done to that point? There are none recorded. Yet his works were evil, as he must have been evil, having been a bastard.

Nowhere was Cain a student or believer in the devil, especially since just before he slew his brother he was attempting to offer a pleasing sacrifice to God, and he was dejected when the sacrifice was not accepted. Rather, John is informing us that Cain was the actual son of the wicked one, as the Greek may be honestly interpreted. That in turn explains how certain Judaeans, those such as Herod the Great as he is described in Revelation chapter 12, could be called dragons and serpents and vipers, and how Christ called them offspring of vipers, which refers not to them only, but also to their parents. They were a race of vipers because they descended from Cain, who was a devil like his father, and from the Nephilim and others of their corruptions.

Deuteronomy 23:7

But mentioning Edomites, this brings us to the next problematical passage we should discuss, which is Deuteronomy 23:7 where the King James Version reads: “7 Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.” that word abhor is Strong’s # 8581, ta’ab, which is primarily to abhor, be abominable, or do abominably. We see the same word in Job chapter 30: “10 They abhor me, they flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face.” It first appears in Deuteronomy chapter 7: “26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.”

A form of ta’ab which is an active partciple of the verb, is Strong’s # 8441, toebah, and it is found in Deuteronomy 12:31 along with another word which means to hate, and that is Strong’s # 8130, sane’. There we read: “Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.” So there we see that abominations are hated by God.

Then we see that same word, Strong’s # 8130, sane’, in Malachi chapter 4 where we read: “1 The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi. 2 I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, 3 And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness. 4 Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the LORD hath indignation for ever.”

Therefore the word hate in Malachi 1:4 does not simply mean to love less, as the denominational commentators often insist. Rather, Yahweh God hates abominations, and the children of Esau having come from Canaanite wives, they are abominations. As Paul described Esau in Hebrews chapter 12,he was a profane man and a fornicator, or race-mixer, for which all of the Edomites are abominations.

So if Yahweh had indignation against Esau forever, and admitted having hated him, and this distinction was made from the womb, as Paul also professed in Romans chapter 9, how could Yahweh insist that the children of Israel not hate Esau in the Law in Deuteronomy 23:7? So we must ask, is Yahweh God a hypocrite, or is there something wrong in Deuteronomy 23:7? The statement in Malachi is not an anomaly. Paul of Tarsus cited it in Romans chapter 9, in his own explanation that many of the people of Judaea in his time were actually Edomites, and not Israelites, which we also see attested in the writings of Strabo and Josephus. Then in Obadiah, Yahweh promises to obliterate all of the descendants of Esau, something which is not yet fulfilled, and in part He says: “18 And the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall kindle in them, and devour them; and there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau; for the LORD hath spoken it.” Why would Yahweh contradict Himself from Deuteronomy 23:7 to Obadiah and Malachi?

The truth is that Yahweh did not contradict Himself at all, however it is absolutely probable that the scribes made the contradiction for Him. There are many places in Hebrew translation where certain letters that resemble one another very closely, especially in the modern Hebrew and cursive writings of scribes, are frequently confused. These occasions are not limited to the confusion of the Hebrew characters Daleth, or ‘d’, and Resh, or ‘r’, but those two letters are probably confused most often.

In Hebrew, the word for Edomite is properly Edomiy, spelled with the letters אדמי, or left-to-right, A-D-M-Y, while the word for Syrian, or properly, Aromiy, which is Aramean, is spelled with the letters ארמי, or left-to-right, A-R-M-Y. Yet the Hebrew letters D and R are so similar in handwriting that they were often confused, and they were confused at an early time since many instances of confusion are evident even in the translation of the Greek Septuagint. There are also many examples, even including this very word, of that confusion in the English translation of the King James Version.

Here are some examples of confusion between the daleth ("D") and the resh ("R") characters:

In Jeremiah 2:20, where the King James version reads "I will not transgress", the verb being from the Hebrew word 'abar, Strong's # 5674, the NASB, NAB, LXX and other versions read "I will not serve", the verb being read from the Hebrew word 'abad, Strong's # 5647.

In 1 Chronicles 13:14, where the man called Obededom in the versions based upon the Masoretic Text is frequently called Abeddaram in the Septuagint, and the Greek version in Brenton’s edition is Αβεδδαρα once and Αβεδδαραμ the second time. Obededom means “servant of Edom”, and Obedaram means “servant of Aram”.

Other examples are found in Genesis Chapter 10, where comparing the Septuagint, In Genesis 10:3 Riphath (KJV) was confused for Diphath (LXX) and in Genesis 10:4 Dodanim (KJV) for Rodanim (LXX).

However quite significantly, the word Aromiy, for Syrians, is confused for Edomites at 2 Samuel 8:13, where the context is clearly Edom in 8:14, and where in the parallel account in 1 Chronicles 18:12-13 it is consistently Edomites.

So we read in 2 Samuel chapter 8: “13 And David gat him a name when he returned from smiting of the Syrians in the valley of salt, being eighteen thousand men. 14 And he put garrisons in Edom; throughout all Edom put he garrisons, and all they of Edom became David's servants. And the LORD preserved David whithersoever he went.” While the context is clearly Edomites, that it was Edomites slain in the valley of salt, the King James translators read the Daleth as a Resh, an ‘r’ rather than a ‘d’, and they wrote Syrians in verse 13. In the version found in 1 Chronicles chapter 18 the translators get it right where we read: “11 Them also king David dedicated unto the LORD, with the silver and the gold that he brought from all these nations; from Edom, and from Moab, and from the children of Ammon, and from the Philistines, and from Amalek. 12 Moreover Abishai the son of Zeruiah slew of the Edomites in the valley of salt eighteen thousand. 13 And he put garrisons in Edom; and all the Edomites became David's servants. Thus the LORD preserved David whithersoever he went. 14 So David reigned over all Israel, and executed judgment and justice among all his people.” There are many other examples of daleth-resh confusion in the manuscripts.

So Yahweh God is not a hypocrite. He is not gong to trick the children of Israel into loving those whom He Himself hates. Deuteronomy 23:7 should read: “7 Thou shalt not abhor a Syrian [Aramean]; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.” Further evidence in support of this is found just a few chapters later, in Deuteronomy 26:5 where we read: “5 And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian [Aramean] ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous.”

The land promised to Abraham, which included both Aram and Edom, was indeed ruled over by either Judah or Israel from the time of David to the time leading up to the Assyrian captivity. The Edomites were Canaanites, as Esau had married Canaanite women, yet the people of Aram were kindred to Israel. It is they who were not to be despised. Jacob was sent to Padanaram, the Plain of Aram, or Syria, to obtain wives, and he obtained them from the house of a man called Laban the Syrian, so it is not unexpected that the Syrians would be considered brethren of the Israelites.

So many denominational Christians may protest at this point, and insist that all wicked people and the descendants of Cain were killed in the flood, but that is not true. So leaving the connections between Cain, Canaan and Esau, we must go back to Genesis chapter 6 to discuss another often mistranslated or misunderstood term, which is earth.

Genesis 6

The primary word translated as earth in the Old Testament is ‘erets, Strong’s # 776. There is another word, adamah, and that appears in Genesis chapter 6 in verses 1, 7 and 20. But ‘erets is the point of contention as it appears much more frequently, and in passages such as verse 17 where we read: “17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”

According to Bibleworks software and the version of the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English lexicon which it employs, the word ‘erets is translated in the King James Version Old Testament as land on 1,543 occasions, and as earth on only 712 occasions. On other occasions it is also translated in such ways as ground, world, field, wilderness, etc., depending on the context. So it should be evident that in the flood accounts of Genesis chapters 6 through 9, the word ‘erets may just as easily have been translated as land rather than earth, and a completely different picture of Noah’s flood begins to emerge from Scripture. Likewise, adamah was translated as land on 125 occasions, as earth 53 times, ground 43 times, and in other ways a handful of times, such as country. So neither of these words refer to the entire planet as we know now it. Even when they are translated as earth, they really only refer to the ground in or of a particular land, as we often use the words earth and land. The entire planet was not referred to as the earth until the English language developed several thousand years after the flood of Noah. It is quite likely that the word earth did not distinctly come to refer to the entire planet until some time after the translation of the King James Bible, but to the translators of the Bible it referred only to a particular land.

So Noah was commanded to take two of every unclean creature into the ark, and seven of every clean animal. Then the Scripture later attests that only 8 people were saved through the flood waters in the land which was flooded. But if the whole planet was flooded, in Genesis chapter 14 we have a reference to people who are called only “roving creatures”, which is the apparent meaning of the name Zuzims. Again, in Genesis chapter 15 we see that in the land of Canaan there are dwelling the Kenites, or descendants of Cain, the Rephaim, who are the giants and who came from the Nephilim, or fallen ones, and several other races that are not listed among the descendants of Noah, which are the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Perizzites, and the Girgashites. In Genesis chapter 13 where we read of Canaan that “the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land”, we see that these peoples are not merely later divisions of Canaanites, but in fact they must have been people of other races with whom the Canaanites had later mingled.

So we must ask whether Noah was compelled to take two each of these races onto the ark, or perhaps even seven each, if they were “clean”. But that is ridiculous, since there is a clear record of the types of animals Noah took upon the ark, and it says nothing of people. In fact, the Adamic race was being destroyed because of those people, for which God had sent the flood in the first place! Instead, the correct answer is that the flood was a local flood, as God sent it to punish the race of Adam for their race-mixing, which we read in Genesis chapter 6, and these other races lived outside of the zone of the flood where destruction was not complete, so they were able to survive. The flood certainly could not have covered the entire globe, or these other races of people, and all of the red, yellow, black and brown people outside of the Bible, would no longer exist.