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Comment by freeksanders | Hacker News Reader

Religious myself. Agree that having a modern translation can make a great difference in readability. I've read parts of the King James translation, and the language makes it a though read.

Personally I enjoy this translation: https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/ I read it in Dutch, but it's available in multiple languages.

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As a bit of an experiment (/procrastination) I randomly clicked through until I arrived at some text. I ended up Judges 19, which is a bizarre story of a concubine (*) that cheats, returns to her parents, then her husband (after a four month delay) goes and finds her there. There's an odd narrative detour where the father in law continues to pressure the husband to stay, but eventually he leaves. While stopped at a strangers home on the journey back, some bandits want to rape him but his host offers his own virgin daughter and the concubine instead, so they rape and kill the concubine. When the protagonist finally gets home he cuts up his dead concubine's body and sends the parts across the land.

This leads to a war (Judges 20) where tens of thousands of people were killed but I decided to stop at this point!

https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/judges...

Wikipedia article on the story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levite%27s_concubine

(*) Searching afterwards, I found this is a somewhat rough translation of a role that doesn't exist in today's society: a lower status wife that hasn't been paid for (!) by her husband.

By the way: (would be an edit but it's too late)

This is not meant to imply any particular judgement on the bible in general or even this particular story. I just found myself on a journey that seemed to me to be very odd, and thought I would share in case others found it interesting.

You are right KJV isn't easy understandable ... the NWT is easy to read

NWT also contains small changes to accommodate the Russellites' belief system.

I don't even speak English natively and can read KJV. I guess it just isn't more difficult than reading in foreign language in general.

Update: Samuel Johnson's dictionary helps with word definitions from 18th century. Noah Webster's dictionary is good too.

Does that even matter though? The KJV was written to best fit in with Christianity in that period of time and situtation. You won't find a Bible or any religious text without bias from those who are translating it.

The dynamics of the KJV were different. N competing Versions had caused divisions among the people, so the king ordered the making of one universal standard. The translation committee was aware of the goal and tried to avoid bias. Curiously it didn't result in N+1 competing Versions, but KJV was almost universally approved and many older Versions were retired. Readers have been content for over four centuries now.

In the case of NWT I think the bias matters because JWs deviate fatally from Christian orthodoxy.

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