OK says Bible to be taught in public schools. Which parts will they teach? I'll start:

[Hekate]

33. There have been several re-writes, in all languages. The Roman Catholics have their version...

The Catholics could see which way the world was going and decided to retranslate their Latin Bible into the vernacular of various European countries so that people wouldn’t get to relying on that Protestant version. Gutenberg’s first big job on his printing press was a Bible in German for the Protestants.

During the hippie days the fundamentalists and others trying to appeal to everyone from teenagers to street people to adults, anyway whoever, put out at least one version that was not retranslated but simply rewritten from King James’ translation to “modern” American — over-simplified, full of textual errors, and with a lot of stuff left out as irrelevant or uninteresting. Someone gave me a copy back in the day — ugh.

There were some really good re-translations into English in the ‘70s, sound up to date scholarship, easy to read, poetic when poetry was called for, and altogether understandable to the reasonably educated, although given how long ago all the various books were written (and it is a library, not a single-authored book) a study guide is still a good idea.

King James is still very popular for many reasons. Doesn’t cost much to print because it is not copyrighted, so it’s everywhere. But mostly it’s because people think it “sounds” holy, and the preacher can tell you what they think it means.

You don’t have to agree with anything, but if someone’s going to try to read it, it should at least be in a translation that’s accurate. The passages about animal blood sacrifices in the holy of holies are particularly vivid, shall we say. So is that wonderful poem from lover to lover known as the Song of Songs. Wow! No wonder there were so many pages of begats.

I wonder which version the Red State schools will choose to have in every classroom, and force the teachers to read from every day? Hmmm.