In another authoritative Hebrew word study, Gesenius observed that the word translated as “perfect” can mean “integrity of mind” or “innocence.” He further commented that the word is used of “simplicity of mind, which is opposed to mischief and ill design” (1979, p. After listing these uses in their wordbook, the authors quote the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible as saying, “the words which are rendered in English by ‘perfect’ and ‘perfection’ denoted originally something other and less than ideal perfection” (1980, p.

The word, or one of its derivatives, is used in Genesis 17:1 where God told Abraham to “be perfect.” And all Israel was instructed to “be perfect” in verses such as Deuteronomy 18:13, 2 Samuel 22:33, and Psalm 101:2,6. The Hebrew word tōm, translated in Job 1:1 as perfect, has a number of different usages.

In their monumental work, the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Harris, Archer, and Waltke addressed specifically the word used in Job 1:1. But a brief study of the original word quickly shows that the Hebrew and Greek words that frequently are translated “perfect” in our English Bibles do not always mean sinlessness. Granted, if the word translated “perfect” in Job 1:1 means “absolute sinlessness,” then Barker has a solid point. But in Job 1:1, the man from Uz named Job was described as a man who “was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and turned away from evil.” Forcing the word “perfect” in Job 1:1 to mean what most twenty-first-century Americans take it to mean, Barker insists that a person cannot be “perfect” (defining the word as sinless, morally without error) and at the same time be sinful. He argues that Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (NKJV). He claims that a biblical contradiction exists between Romans 3:23 and Job 1:1 (1992, p. To illustrate, consider Dan Barker’s book, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist. Then they will demand an answer to this “obvious contradiction.” In many instances, the skeptic will take words, and impose upon them a twenty-first-century meaning that was not intended in the original text.

When it comes to the Bible, and claims of its alleged errancy, skeptics often employ the tactic of assigning certain meanings to the biblical language that the original words do not necessarily have. It has been said that, in an argument, the person or party who defines the terms always wins. Nailing down accurate definitions to words remains one of the major problems in communicating any message to another person.

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