Unfortunate words in the Bible? How can anything in the word of God be unfortunate?

Well, of course I don’t mean that the Bible originally has poorly chosen vocabulary. We are the ones who make the words of the Bible unfortunate, embarrassing, confusing, awkward, and downright weird.

This all happens for a variety of reasons. Some words are old fashioned, and Christians are very good at holding on to old fashioned words. Think of “testify” or “witness” being used in any context other than a courtroom. In other cases, Christians have fixated on words and tried to stuff the whole Bible into a single idea, like “salvation,” one of the unfortunate words we’ll look at later. Some words, like “god” or “hell,” were borrowed in the original languages from other religions and the same happened in English. We are really good at forgetting about those sorts of things. The meaning of some words has changed so much in English that we’ve ended up making up dangerous confusions. We will see this with words like “charity,” “redeem,” and “faith.” Some words have come to mean different things in church life from the actual biblical texts they reference, like “tithe.” And last, but not least unfortunate, there are words that simply have no good reason for being in our Bible whatsoever, like unicorns!