Emily Smith

Consider the following quote from Wycliffe’s English Bible: “If a man slepith with a man, bi letcherie of a womman, euer either hath wrouyt vnleueful thing, die thei bi deeth; her blood be on hem”. Lechery comes from the Old French lecherie, which is interestingly similar to the French le cher, meaning “dear” or “loved one”. It’s also important to note that more than four hundred and fifty translations of the Bible currently exist, which are merely copies of copies – the original manuscripts were lost or destroyed, which leaves the purest interpretation of biblical scripture to the reader.

But I digress already…*cough*

In the King James Bible, lecherie consistently means “adultery”, especially in the Old Testament where many of the “clobber passages” (i.e. passages condemning homosexuality) come from. Vnleueful, the Middle English variant of unlawful, means illegal; during the time Wycliffe translated the Bible (his is actually the earliest complete translation from Latin into English, 14c.) fencing, selling any vegetable save carrots on Sundays, and hanging a bed out of a window were unlawful as well. Unlawful, in Wycliffe’s Bible, was translated directly from the Latin statuere meaning “establish”, and statuere from stare meaning “to stand”, and from the Proto-Indo-European stā- meaning “stand” or “pillar” or “place”. A version of stā- exists in Persian (-stân) meaning “place of”. The etymology implies a pillar with which an ideology is supported (i.e. The Four Pillars of Democracy), not a Godly and spiritual law, as ...