NS, I read all the versions of the Bible, and am indebted to the translators which K James got together.
OK, it's your translation of choice, I get that – it is for many.
Re Deuteronomy 22:28:
KJV: "If a man find a damsel
that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found"
The Hebrew 'lay hold of' is the verb
tapas which Strong's Hebrew states to mean: 'take, handle, hold, catch, surprise' – and explains as 'to catch, handle, lay hold, take hold of, seize, wield, grasp, arrest' and so on. Interestingly, it's a different verb in the case of a betrothed woman – in that case the verb is
hazaq 'to force' – so the implication is, as you will argue, that in the case of the betrothed women she is forced (and cries out) and in the case of the unbetrothed woman she is not necessarily forced, and does not cry out ... ergo she consents.
However, the Greek Septuagint uses the verb
biasamenos (βιασάμενος) and the Greeks translates as 'force' in both cases, so maybe a later generation of Jews, who had rubbed shoulders with the Hellenic world, took a different view than their Deuteronomic forebears?
So if she is consenting, it's a 'shotgun wedding', and if she's not, and it is rape, then the rapist pays off her dad, and she is obliged to marry her rapist, which means she loses out all the way round – but that's my contemporary sensibility talking – I can't just the Deuteronomist scribe by my 21st century values.
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The KJV, like all translations, is the product of a committee, and a comnmittee under direction.
The renown theologian David Bentley Hart has produced a translation of the NT and offers this:
"... almost all modern translations of the text have been produced not by single scholars with their own particular visions of the text but by committees. The inevitable consequence of this is that many of the most important decisions are negotiated accommodations, achieved by general agreement, and favoring only those solutions that prove the least offensive to everyone involved. This becomes, in effect, a process of natural selection, in which novel approaches to the text are generally the first to perish, and only the tried and trusted survive. And this can result in the exclusion not only of extravagantly conjectural readings, but often of the most straightforwardly literal as well. (A sort of 'acid test' for me is Judas [or Jude] 1:19, a verse whose meaning is startlingly clear in the Greek but which no collaborative translation I know of translates in any but the vaguest and most periphrastic manner.)" [DBH, Introduction, xiv]
And with regard to Jude 1:19:
Greek: Οὗτοί εἰσιν οἱ ἀποδιορίζοντες ψυχικοί πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες
KJV: "These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit."
DBH: "These are those who cause divisions, psychical men, not possessing spirits."
Hart's translation brings out a view that would be at home in its world, but reads strangely in ours – we are not used to the distinctions and discernments between mind and spirit, between natural and supernatural natures – any way one looks at it, to take a text which is an extended commentary on the spiritual origins and ends of the world, and translate '
psychikos' as 'sensual', is to do the words much injustice, as is translating the Greek
logos by the Latin
verbum and the English
word.
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