This article is part of a series on the changing meaning of English words and its impact on the King James Only debate. To see the introduction to this series, click HERE.
Words, over time, change in their meaning and usage. Terms that meant one thing even a relatively short time ago may now mean something completely different to present-day English speakers. These changes can impact how we read, understand, and apply older English writings without our even realizing that we are misunderstanding what the author meant. There are, for example, many passages in the KJV that seem to modern readers to be saying something quite different than the same verses in modern translations. Often, however, when one understands how the relevant words were used four hundred years ago in England, it becomes clear that the KJV and modern translations are actually saying the same thing. For an example of this, let’s consider the word “Halt.”
How long halt ye?
“Halt” is a somewhat archaic term, but a fairly familiar one. We often depict guards from bygone eras proclaiming to suspicious persons, “Halt! Who goes there?” Even in contemporary usage, we occasionally speak of someone or something “coming to a halt.” So, while we don’t use it that often, many of us are aware of the word “halt” and have a consistent definition for it. To the contemporary English speaker, it means “stop.” When we pick up the King James Version, we quite naturally bring this definition with us as we read passages like:
“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions?” (1 Kings 18:21).
We thus read this as, “how long will you stop between two opinions,” or “how long will you stand frozen between two opinions.” This seems reasonable enough, and so we keep reading on without giving it a second thought. The problem is, the word “halt” here is not being used in the sense of “stop,” for that is not what the Hebrew word here means. The word actually means to limp or hobble, and indeed, that is what “halt” meant to the KJV translators. Look, for example, at how it is used at the close of the story of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32:
“And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh. Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank,” (Genesis 32:31).
Jacob didn’t “stop” upon his thigh that had been wounded. That wouldn’t make any sense. He “limped” upon it. Similarly, we see “halt” used as an adjective or even a noun in reference to the crippled and lame throughout the gospels in places like:
“…it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed…” (Matthew 18:8, see also Mark 9:45).
“…Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind,” (Luke 14:21).
“In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water,” (John 5:3).
The “halt” are those who hobble, limp, and stumble; those who cannot walk properly. They are the crippled. Returning to 1 Kings 18:21, Elijah is not saying “how long will you stop between two positions.” He is actually saying, “How long will you limp or stumble back and forth between two positions. This is why the ESV reads:
“How long will you go limping between two different opinions?”
The NIV and CSB read a bit more interpretively:
“How long will you waver between two opinions?”
And the NKJV says:
“How long will you falter between two opinions?”
To “falter” literally means “to move unsteadily; to stumble.” The people were limping back and forth, weakly flip-flopping between their lip service to God and their worship of idols with no real commitment. They were, to borrow the words of James 1:8, double-minded men, unstable in all their ways. The point is, the KJV is actually saying the same thing as the ESV here. “Halt” meant, to the KJV translators, the same thins as “limp.” Today, however, because of the changes in the English language, we read the passage and walk away with a different sense than the author or the translators intended.
