Lost in Translation: Recovering the Origins of Familiar Biblical Words

The Bible is words—it is, at the end of the day, nothing more than that. How those words have been read and understood has formed the basis of everything from private faith to public policy for two thousand years. Yet for the most part, casual readers—and even many professional interpreters, clerical and scholarly—are unaware of how culture has impacted the commonly accepted meanings of so many words and terms. To read the Bible well is to understand that the text is not the same as its int...