Everybody knows the Bible is God’s Word (understand I’m ONLY referring to the “Old” Testament here).
Therefore, some idiots will conclude there are literally ZERO mistakes in the Scriptures.
Well, today I’m going to put that misconception to death…hopefully for all time.
Let’s take a look at the following 2 verses and pay especially close attention to the 2 words I have bolded, underlined and colored in red.
“…and they buried him near the boundary of his property in Timnat-Heres, in the hills of Efrayim, north of Mount Ga‘ash.”-Judges 2:9
And then we have this one…
“According to Adonai’s order they gave him the city he had asked for, Timnat-Serach in the hills of Efrayim; so he built up the city and lived in it.”-Joshua 19:50
The name of Joshua TIMNAT-HERES is referring to Joshua’s personal territory that he inherited..
However, in the Book of Judges we’re told the name is a slightly different word: TIMNAT-SERACH.
It appears to be two different names but they’re not.
So is this is an ancient copyist error?
You bet your booty boondocks it is homies.
And don’t tell me this is a minor issue.
It’s the difference between saying Jack the Ripper and Jack the Stripper.
Two totally different words referring to two different professions.
If the location name was properly transliterated into English, it would be TIMNAH-CHERES with a “ch” instead of an “h”.
Because of the spelling mistake this copyist made, this falsehood has been promoted throughout the centuries with every Tom, Dick and Harry Bible teacher trying to come up with some creative new spin on what the word really means.
It’s kind of like how everyone mistakenly thinks the Shaddai in EL SHADDAI means “Almighty” (it doesn’t. It means “mountain”).
Look, it’s pretty easy to see what happened.
became .
In other words, the letters SAMECH-REYSH-CHET were reversed to CHET-REYSH-SAMECH.
Why this happened is anyone’s guess.
Maybe the copyist had a little too much wine to drink the night before.
And let’s not forget the original Hebrew didn’t have any vowels, so folks had to make educated guesses about how to exactly say the Hebrew words out loud.
So here’s the big takeaway folks.
These kinds of copyist mistakes were NOT a rare occurrence.
They occurred all the freakin’ time.
Remember, copy machines and Microsoft word didn’t exist during the Biblical era.
Every ancient Biblical manuscript had to be written out word-for-word, letter-for-letter.
However, for the most part, simple mistakes were pretty easy to spot and correct (and most of these errors have been corrected).
Unfortunately, English Bible translators were slow to follow suit because they base most of their translations on the Greek and Latin texts.
Anyways, just know that TIMNAT-CHERES, TIMNAT-HERES and TIMNAT-SERACH are ALL referring to the very same location.
Over and out homies.
Leave a Reply