This is why I threw away all bibles except the KJV.
Daniel 3:25King James Version (KJV)
25 He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.
Daniel 3:25New Living Translation (NLT)
25 “Look!” Nebuchadnezzar shouted. “I see four men, unbound, walking around in the fire unharmed! And the fourth looks like a god[a]!”
Footnotes:
- 3:25 Aramaic like a son of the gods.
Daniel 2:4 – 7:28 is written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew, and the although the Hebrew word for God, ’ĕlôhim, is used with a singular force in the Hebrew parts of the Old Testament, the Aramaic word for God, ’ělâhîn (found in Daniel 3:25), is
always plural. Therefore, although the paraphrase used in the NLT is ridiculous, the footnote is precisely correct!
An excellent and precisely accurate translation of Daniel 3:25 is found in the Second Edition (1972) of the Revised Standard Version,
25. He answered, “But I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”
The KJV is a relic from an age of biblical ignorance and verbal antiquities!
Thomas Shelton’s 1612 English translation of the first of the two volumes of
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha is written in the same beautiful English as the 1611 KJV, but without the extreme archaisms. For example, in Matt. 4:2 we read in the KJV,
4:2. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward Matthew 4:2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.
The expression, ‘an hungred’ is so ancient and obscure that today’s most prominent lexicographers of the English language disagree on the meaning of it. Moreover, the expression was so ancient and obscure even when the KJV was first published in 1611 that printers of it believed it to be a grammatical error and attempted to correct it by changing it to “an hungered,” or “a hungered,” or “ahungered.” In my study, I have copies of the KJV with all four of these renderings. We do not find ludicrous messes like this in good translations of the Bible.