In recent days, speaking of the last twenty years, men have used much ink and spoken many words to debunk a doctrine of the perfect preservation of Words of God in Psalm 12:6-7. Commentators through history have interpreted Psalm 12:6-7 as a promise of the preservation of the poor and needy, mentioned in Psalm 12:5. Modern critical text advocates strive to back or ensure that interpretation against a teaching of preservation of words. With this conversation occurring or continuing, more evidence arises for the preservation of words viewpoint.
I haven’t heard anything new to contribute to the preservation of the poor and needy, except for possibly one new point. Critical text proponents like Mark Ward say the same old, same old. Some of his audience didn’t know his arguments, but they aren’t new. With that being said, this is an argument from Ward I have never heard. I didn’t know about it until recently reading him in the comment section at youtube.
Not Perfect Preservation?
Ward says that the present application of perfect preservation from Psalm 12:6-7 arose out of the King James Only movement of the twentieth century. He knows that men taught preservation of words from Psalm 12:6-7, such as Matthew Poole, just that none of them, including Poole, he is saying, took that as perfect preservation. I had not heard anyone ever make that particular point. It seems like a raising of the bar on expectations in the language of the commentators. Is Ward implying that when men wrote that Psalm 12:6-7 promises the preservation of the Words of God, that they were saying that God was promising less than perfect preservation? And is that even preservation?
I’ve used this illustration before, but let’s say that you had a jar with 100 marbles in it. Twenty years later, you still have the jar, and someone wants to purchase it. You guarantee that you preserved the marbles in the jar. The customer counts them and there are 98, not 100. Did you preserve the marbles in the jar? Is that the plain meaning of preservation of marbles?
Ward is implying that 93 to 98 marbles is still the preservation of the marbles. Preservation of the marbles doesn’t mean 100 out of 100, because 93 to 98 is still preservation. Is that what you think? I don’t think of losing marbles as preserving them. That is not preserving them. You’ve preserved some of them, so preservation occurred, but you can’t say you preserved them, speaking of the marbles in the original jar.
When Jesus said that no man shall pluck “them” out of his hand (John 10:28), with similar understanding of preservation, you could take that as no man shall pluck 93 to 98 percent of them out of his hand. He didn’t say “all of them” after all. If God promised to keep or preserve the poor and needy, to be consistent, when Ward says Psalm 12:7 promises to keep the poor and needy, that means not all of the poor and needy, just some of them. It’s not perfect preservation of the poor and needy. Myself and others might call that betraying plain meaning of language.
Hebrew Singular Masculine Pronominal Suffix in Psalm 12:7
Besides that above argument, a new one that rose out of a challenge to Ward about his representation of the history of Psalm 12:6-7 commentary, I have read none. I have heard the argument Ward makes from the King James translators notation about the second “them” in Psalm 12:7. It translates the singular masculine suffix. Ward says that necessitates poor and needy, because “words” aren’t a “him.” “Words” aren’t a “she” either, even though the gender of “words” is feminine.
Every Hebrew word is masculine or feminine, because there is no neuter in the Hebrew. Someone might call this a dumb argument, that a masculine suffix must refer to people. What do we do with all the things or objects in the Old Testament? What kind of pronominal suffix are we going to use for all those non-neuter words?
This pronoun point revolves around this comment in the margins of the original King James translation by the translators: “Heb. Him, i.e., every one of them.” They are correct. They are noting that a masculine singular suffix in the Hebrew is “him” in the English. Then they explain with the comment why they translated this “them”: “every one of them.” The singular meant, they are saying, “every one of them,” speaking of whatever antecedent “him,” “everyone of them,” or “them” refers to.
Psalm 12:7 reads: “Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” The verse is not saying twice, “Thou shalt keep them” and “Thou shalt keep them,” or, “Thou shalt preserve them” and “Thou shalt preserve them.” No, it is making two statements with a nuance of difference: “Thou shalt keep them” and “thou shalt preserve every one of them.” They are not saying the English should be, “him,” but that the English should be, “every one of them.” On Part 4 of The Textual Confidence Collective series (starting at about 5:48), Mark Ward begins speaking with a kind of glee in his voice and says these exact words:
And it’s really interesting here, one of the tip offs to sort of the interpretive question here comes in the note that is actually in the margin of the King James, even in this TBS edition. For that second “them,” “thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them” (and I’m convinced this is where the word preservation starts to get used by the King James only or textual absolutist movements), it says in the margins, the Hebrew is actually, “him,” that is, “every one of them.” And if the Hebrew is actually “him,” that is, every one of them,” every one of them must not be “the words,” because words are not him and her. Words are things. Words are it. Therefore, it must be in the view of the King James translators, that second pronoun, must be pointing back to the antecedent we find in verse 5: “For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.” So the words of the Lord here are not the Bible. They are these immediate words, “I’m going to protect the poor, uh, who are oppressed.”
This is coming from a PhD from Bob Jones University, and other PhDs or PhD candidates sit there and say nothing, when he makes these foot-in-the-mouth statements with a kind of giggling glee. Why? They don’t even look like they disagree. Zero pronominal suffixes in the entire Old Testament are an “it,” because there is no neuter pronominal suffix. There are no neuter Hebrew nouns to which to refer. The King James translators would have been laughing on Ward’s interpretation of them.
Timothy Berg writes about this at his blog (and Ward has concurred many times):
Understand what has taken place here with these two lines. The translators had to either choose, “them” and so maintain the number of the original, but lose the gender, or choose “him” and maintain the gender of the original but lose the number. The meaning in both cases is a plural group of multiple “hims,” employing first the plural then the singular in keeping with the psalmist’s pattern. But there is no form “hims” in English, so every translator must lose something of the original text in translating it into English. The point to note here though is that they clearly understood the referent of the singular suffix as being back to the alternating singular and plural in verses one and five, being a reference to the people. This is surely self-evident to anyone reading the passage in its context, and abundantly evident to anyone who reads the original translators notes (and even more so when they realize the origin of this particular note in the Bishop’s base text). If we had only continued to print these notes, and listened to the KJV translators themselves, so much bad interpretation could have been avoided. Maintaining today that the phrase is a promise to preserve God’s words in the KJV is to utterly disagree with what the translators themselves intended to convey, which, in a text now being adduced as support for their infallibility, seems odd at best.
These men say this proves that “them” by the King James translators could never refer to “words” in verse 6. That very much misunderstands gender in the Hebrew. Berg is saying that “him” must mean people, because a “him” must be people in the Hebrew. Remember, this is a masculine suffix with “preserve,” that the translators translated “preserve them.”
How would you go about proving the point that Berg and Ward are making in their assessment of a comment by the KJV translators? I would look at similar examples with gender through the Old Testament to see if that’s true. They are saying that a masculine suffix must always refer to a person, because a masculine is a person. This is their representation of original languages. Again, they don’t take that from anything the KJV translators wrote. This is their own personal call.
Berg or Ward do not reference one Hebrew grammar or syntax to make that point. They do not show you several examples to evince the truth of this argument. They speak as those having authority on the Hebrew language. As Johnny Cochran famously called the prosecution of the OJ Simpson trial, it is a “rush to judgment.” These are men eager to have something mean something that doesn’t mean something. They don’t even know it means something. I think they could assume that they have an audience of their own tribe ready to accept their own bias. This is today called “confirmation bias,” where they rush to confirm their own bias.
Let’s open our Bibles to the first chapter of the Bible, the book of Genesis, and Genesis 1:16-17:
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.
God made lights. God “set them.” “Them” refers to the lights, wouldn’t you agree? A masculine refers to “lights.” This does not correspond exactly to Psalm 12:6-7, but it does in the argument that Ward and Berg are making. A masculine must refer to a person.
Turning to Psalms, Psalm 18:14 says:
Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them.
“Arrows” is masculine too, but it is plural. He scattered the masculine arrows.
A better example is Job 39:14-15:
14 Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in dust, 15 And forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them.
“Eggs” is plural. “Them” in “crush them” is a third person feminine suffix. In other words, “crush her,” but it is “crush every one of them.” “Eggs” and “them” are both feminine.
Just as a gender sample, the same kind of construction in Psalm 12:6-7 and in Psalm 119 is found elsewhere, such as Leviticus 20:8:
And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which sanctify you.
“Statutes” is feminine and “them” is masculine. Again, a masculine pronoun refers to a thing, which is also feminine. The same is in Leviticus 22:31:
Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the LORD.
Commandments is feminine and them is masculine.
The same is in Numbers 15:39. Also, Nehemiah 1:9:
But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them.
Commandments is feminine and them is masculine. In Ezekiel 37:24, “statutes” is feminine and “them” is masculine.
I’m not going to keep going with this argument, but you can see that Berg and Ward are wrong on the Hebrew of this. I’ve already written many times that gender is nullified by Hebrew grammar as an argument for the “poor and needy.” Because of that, we should go to the nearest antecedent rule, which is “words.” Ward himself said the examples were clear in Psalm 119 of purposeful gender discord, so he relents there. He says it isn’t in Psalm 12:6-7, but that’s only because he chooses to ignore the nearest antecedent, which is clear.
This Generation
Psalm 12:7 says, “Lord. . . . shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” The two different viewpoints also take the last part of the verse in two ways. The preserve-the-poor-and-needy position says that “from this generation” is a physical separation from the attacks of the wicked. The preserve-the-words position says that “from this generation” is a linear chronological separation from the present moment and on into eternity.
The Hebrew preposition translated “from” in the English has a root meaning of separation. Preserve-the-words takes the normal, plain meaning of the Hebrew dur, generation, which is a period, speaking of this present time. This language of time is echoed in the Old (Isaiah 59:21) and the New Testaments (Mt 5:18, 24:35) in other preservation passages. This is the regular usage of this Hebrew construction, translated, “from this generation for ever.”
Preserve-the-poor-and-needy takes an exceptional usage. I see generation used of the wicked, but it is always accompanied by “evil” as in “evil generation” (Dt 1:35), “generation that had done evil” (Num 32:13), or “crooked generation” (Dt 32:5). When meaning “evil generation,” it is accompanied by these types of descriptors.
Every time you read the words, “from generation” (eleven times), it is a linear chronological separation from this present moment into the future. If it was something other than that in Psalm 12:7, then it is the only time in the entire Old Testament, or an entirely exceptional usage. Normally we call this eisegesis of scripture, because it doesn’t consider all the usages of this construction contradicting it. Timothy Berg does this in his Psalm 12 article.
Synonymous Parallelism
The poetry in Psalm 12:7 is parallelism and in particular “synonymous parallelism.” The second part of the parallelism repeats a variation of what the first part expresses. If this is synonymous parallelism, which is how it reads in Psalm 12:7, then both parts must refer to the same antecedent. It expresses the same truth in two different ways. “Thou shalt keep them . . . . thou shalt preserve them.”
I talked about this parallelism in the last post, that it teaches plenary and then verbal preservation of the Words of God. I want to give a heads up to the mention of “synonymous parallelism” to Jeff Riddle in his Word Magazine podcast on youtube. He talked about this and may have also given credit to Peter Van Kleeck, Sr. at the Standard Sacred Text blog.
I added this to the post above, because I needed to find it in the youtube video.
On Part 4 of The Textual Confidence Collective series (starting at about 5:48), Mark Ward begins speaking with a kind of glee in his voice and says these exact words:
This is coming from a PhD from Bob Jones University, and other PhDs or PhD candidates sit there and say nothing, when he makes these foot-in-the-mouth statements with a kind of giggling glee. Why? They don’t even look like they disagree. Zero pronominal suffixes in the entire Old Testament are an “it,” because there is no neuter pronominal suffix. There are no neuter Hebrew nouns to which to refer. The King James translators would have been laughing on Ward’s interpretation of them.
Mark Ward’s PhD was in NT Interpretation, not in OT or in Biblical languages.
It seems like as a PhD, who is producing an apparent scholarly video to unmask something bad, he would have at least asked on that one. And none of the other three knew about the Hebrew noun? I knew he was NT interpretation PhD. Speaking to someone with that kind of education, he thought there was no way that this could be true, that someone was trying to make a point with that. Thanks for the comment though.
He also treats the doctrine of preservation as if it was invented, the term preservation, by KJVO and textual absolutists. It seems tell-tale. Are they the only ones who believe in “preservation”? Critical text people didn’t use the word preservation. It makes sense.
That does look like a quite inaccurate comment. Maybe he meant they would have said “it” in the KJV marginal note despite it’s being masculine in Hebrew if the translators thought it was the words being preserved. But they certainly could have been a lot more clear if that is what they meant to say, and it is not nearly as conclusive-sounding as the argument it sounds like they are making, which is clearly erroneous.
I think that is probably what he meant. I tried to discuss that with Mark on one of the threads, but someone else jumped in to defend him and I eventually just bowed out. However, I think he agreed with the point the other guy made — that is, he was claiming that if the King James translators meant the words rather than the people, they would have put “it” in the marginal note, “† Heb. it. i. euery one of them.” He (not Mark) wrote, “If they meant for ‘them’ to refer to the words and not the people, they surely would’ve offered ‘it’ as the literal reading.” I don’t agree, but I think that was what he was attempting to say.
Kent: “Ward says that the present application of perfect preservation from Psalm 12:6-7 arose out of the King James Only movement of the twentieth century. He knows that men taught preservation of words from Psalm 12:6-7…It seems like a raising of the bar on expectations in the language of the commentators.”
Brother, I think you hit the nail on the head here. I have been trying to say something like that, but you said it better. The bar must be raised so that the commentators, interpreters, and preachers must say exactly that they mean perfect preservation. Why? — because everybody knows that some of them definitely taught the preservation of the Scriptures.
Can we not turn that around and ask, since they said the scriptures teach preservation, can’t we believe that they meant preservation in an exact sense, unless they specifically said they did not believe that? We should not read preservation out of what they wrote, when they wrote it in!
Dear Bro Vaughn,
Thanks for your comment.
The way to determine if that is what the KJV translators likely meant is to look at the marginal notes in the OT where they make Hebrew comments and see if they speak of masculine suffixes as “it” when they are referring to neuter words. Anyone with Accordance Bible software could do that study with the KJV 1611 marginal note module, which I believe comes free with their KJV module, but I don’t have time to do it right now, and I rather suspect that our critical text brethren who made the either grossly inaccurate or very unclear comment on Psalm 12:6-7 did not provide parallel examples from KJV marginal notes.
I don’t have any kind of program like that. I did use the search feature on the 1611 Barker printing at Archive.org. I did not find any marginal notes using the search terms “Heb. it” or “Hebr. it”. However, there are lots of limitations on the accuracy of a such a search — especially, but not limited to, those related to the optical character recognition scans.
Maybe some reader with the right kind of software and some time on his hands might launch out into such a search!
There are a lot of lists provided on the internet of the KJV marginal notes, printed word for word. Nowhere is there a Heb, it. Or, Heb. it. Of course, the reason why is there is no “Heb. it.” in the Bible. It doesn’t exist.
Mark Ward is writing a scholarly piece for apparently scholarly journals on Psalm 12. Does this disqualify him? Probably not. Again, confirmation bias. They want a piece on this, so if you write it, they will come. It doesn’t have to be right. It might be better if it’s wrong.
Right. There is no reason that the King James translators would have ever given a marginal note with “† Heb. it. i.e. …” Even if we prove its absence, their absence then seems to become proof that Psalm 12:7 could not mean words!
Scholarly journals and university presses are not all they are cracked up to be. I do not know specifically about Christian journals, but in the secular arena certain scholars have proven that, because of confirmation bias, they could get bogus articles accepted and printed in “peer-reviewed” journals – articles that even most teenagers would have known were not true and would have laughed at!
I am familiar with a situation when a university press wanted an historical article on a topic. Of the two articles presented, they chose and published the one that told a “better” story – but could not document its history, and even used a creative technique of combining and modifying some of the persons and events in the story. One editorial review praises it profusely for reading like a novel, while being all fact. (Except it is not all fact.)
So much for trusting the scholars! (Note: I am not against scholarship, but we must learn enough to judge the scholars for ourselves based on what they say or write, not on the credentials in front of and behind their names.)
Thanks. Keep up the good work.
There are examples of the KJB translators mentioning objects as “him” in the 1611 marginal notes.
“The LORD is well pleased for his righteousness’ sake; he will magnify the law, and make it honourable.” (Isaiah 42:21)
The word “it” written here comes with the brief marginal note: “or, him.”
Since this is a synonym parallelism (or Hebraism), the supplied word “it” here is referring to “the law.” This is despite the fact “the law (תּוֹרָה)” is feminine. Yet they denote it in the margin as “him.” So, the English usage of the translators did allow for referring to objects, in this case “the law” as “him” in the marginal notes. And this was not seen as an error of English in Isaiah 42:21 or in Psalm 12:7. So to the translators, “him” can indeed refer to objects, even if these objects were feminine in Hebrew, and it doesn’t have to imply that it’s referring to a person or people rather than objects.
However, I don’t think the argument from what the 1611 translators said as some kind of “gotcha” is a valid one to begin with. The bottom line is the only thing that’s not of private interpretation is Scripture (see 2 Peter 1:20-21).
Dear Andrew,
I appreciate your seeking to get good examples from Scripture.
I agree that it isn’t a “gotcha” either way. The KJV translators were wrong on the nature of baptism, and even if (for the sake of argument; there is no proof that they were wrong) they were wrong on the interpretation of Psalm 12:7, let God be true but every man a liar.
How do we know that the KJV marginal note would not be taking the “or him” as a statement that something other than the “law” is in view, so that if the italicized “it” is supplied, then the “law” is in view, but some other interpretation is in view if “him” is supplied? I don’t see why they would say “or him” if they were thinking of the feminine word torah.
I should have looked at it first before I said good catch, but I don’t see a similarity between Psalm 12:7 and the Isaiah 42:21 passage. I didn’t look at the Hebrew or even the verse. There is no “every one of them,” meaning “him.” Thanks for trying though Andrew, but you’ll need to go back to the drawing board.
Hi KJB1611,
The main point can stand. While people seek to misconstrue the intent of the translators, they miss the larger point. A lot of times when people criticize this translation, they are also criticizing the translations that came before it, because it’s not only the work of the 1611 translation project. The apparatuses meanwhile are only there to help understand the context of what we are reading. Out of the 7,342 footnotes, often times they are useful or insightful, but not always (see Daniel 6:18 or Zechariah 9:15). Since the intent of the writers in these footnotes (or in the epistle to the readers, or the dedicatory) is of private interpretation, we should be wary of people trying to tell us what it all is supposed to mean. They could just be imposing their own meaning on those words.
We have pretty good English translations that are similar to the KJV from before 1611, so people who try to criticize the translators judging by the basis of their apparatus, like the italics or the marginal notes, or something else they wrote, haven’t made some kind of brilliant counterpoint against the translation itself. People who like this translation are free to point out the issues with these apparatus whenever we like. In fact, many have corrected this apparatus. For instance, the marginal note at Isaiah 63:11 originally pointed to a nonexistent verse – Psalm 77:21, but this was later corrected to the correct reference (in the 1629 edition and later KJV editions). The last marginal note in the whole 1611 Bible was redundant, it simply said “hell: Or, hell” (Revelation 20:13).
We don’t have to explain why these say what they say because these are simply part of the apparatus of the Bible.
Regarding the Isaiah 42:21 footnote, I don’t see how my earlier view is definitively refuted. I’ve left the window open to the fact that it is definitely possible the marginal notes referred to an object as “him.” If they choose to reject that, that’s what I would call unreasonable and requires a further explanation. Just because they think that it can’t mean that is not convincing to me. To support this, take for example the footnote at Psalm 5:9. There is found an example of “their” in the text having a footnote that says “Heb. in his mouth. i. in the mouth of any of them.”
While this isn’t the same as Isaiah 42:21 or Psalm 12:7 in that the object is masculine (i.e. the enemies of verse 8), it is clearly the case here that the translators supply a substitution of “in his mouth” beside the main text “in their mouth.” This means therefore that the notes in the margin suggested the word “his” as being a literal translation instead of the actual word, “their,” in this place. This one is similar to “their” and “him” in the margin of Psalm 12:7 in this way.
So in Psalm 5:9, despite the object remaining (unquestionably) the same within the marginal supplied literal reading, this footnote was only supplied in order to show that the third person masculine singlar actually underlies the word “their” in the KJV text, but however that this translation of “their” is still reasonable because the meaning of this singular usage is “of any of them,” similar to Psalm 12:7, and hence signifying that this statement distributes individually and collectively to the entire group of enemies, rather than being “mismatched” to the plural enemies of verse 8. This is an example, like in Isaiah, where the word “his” is supplied, but there is no change to what the possessive pronoun applies to. For instance, they did not supply “his” because the word “their” was applied to the plural enemies, while “his” was applied to a singular antecedent. So it’s possible that this is the case in the other verses as well.
KJB1611 also said: “I don’t see why they would say “or him” if they were thinking of the feminine word torah.”
The answer is that this is what they did in Psalm 12:7, but since this is the topic precisely at hand, we also have the following wordier reason: that just as there can be a singular possessive attached to a plural antecedent, there are also cases where the genders are mismatched between the word and its antecedent, and a more literal rendering of said word could be supplied. In these cases, the marginal notes could choose to supply the underlying word (for instance the word “his”) for any reason whatsoever. If it applied to something which we would refer to as “it” in English, the marginal notes could choose (for whatever reason!) to point out that the underlying word (in this case, וְיַאְדִּֽיר) would cause a literal rendering as “his.” One possible reason that I would table would be that the genders mismatch and they wish to point this out. Lastly, I would add that usually if the antecedent is changed in the margin, the translators usually clarify this with additional comments. But to caveat: Just because they don’t do this doesn’t say anything one way or another, though.
More literal doesn’t mean more accurate, by the way.
Unfortunately, the large majority of people who watch their video and know no Hebrew will just assume that their argument is conclusive, when it is anything but that.