“The Commandment Was Never ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill'”
One of the more consequential translation errors in Western history is sitting right in the middle of the Ten Commandments.
The sixth commandment in Hebrew is lo tirtsach. The verb ratsach doesn’t mean “to kill.” It means “to murder” — specifically, the unlawful, premeditated taking of a human life. There is a different Hebrew verb for killing in general (harag), and a different one for killing in warfare (nakah). The tradition was careful with these distinctions because the distinctions carry legal and moral weight.
When the King James translators rendered ratsach as “kill” in 1611, they collapsed a precise legal category into a broad prohibition. The result was centuries of debate that the original text was not actually having. Does the commandment prohibit capital punishment? Warfare? Self-defense? The Hebrew tradition had clear answers to all of these because the word was precise. The translation lost the precision, and the debates filled the gap.
This is one example from a chapter in The Ground Beneath on what happens to meaning when it moves between languages that don’t share the same conceptual categories. Ratsach isn’t just a different word for the same idea. It’s a word for a category that some languages don’t isolate at all. Moving it into a language that doesn’t isolate that category changes what the commandment is about.
Translation loss is not always a failure of scholarship. Sometimes it’s a failure of luck — the right word wasn’t there in the receiving language, and what filled the gap carried its own assumptions.
— Richard P. Wolf