Was there information lost during the translation of the King James Version of the bible?

Answer 1

There was no inadvertent loss of information, and the King James Version (KJV) is no doubt an improvement on the Bishops' Bible that preceded it. In their address to the readers, the translators themselves say: "Truly, we never thought, from the beginning ... that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one; but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one." The original KJV of 1611 even included the Apocrypha, which were removed in the 1666 version.

The KJV did take into account the wishes of King James, the political and social situation of the seventeenth century and the religious perspective of the translators. Also, some mistranslations were inevitable, resulting in a loss of conceptual information because the translators simply did not understand or accept the polytheism of the early Hebrews. So, when the Old Testament spoke of the asherahs, the English translators translators simply wrote 'groves' or similar - they did not realise that there had been a Hebrew goddess called Asherah or that the asherahs were her carved images.

Naturally the KJV could not correct the interpolations, mistranslations or omissions of the past. Whatever was in their sources, the translators had to use. One can now point to many errors in the King James Version, and there are now some more literal translations, but the KJV remains the standard by which other English Bibles are judged.