Replenish the earth?

I haven't done this in a while, so it should be fun!

Every now and then I have people ask me questions that make me go "Ah-ha!".
I love those kinds of questions and I have one today.

Question: Why did God tell Adam and Eve to replenish the Earth?  If God had just created the Earth, isn't it safe to say that it was never "plenished" to begin with?  Obviously this proves that there were people before Adam and Eve, right?

Answer: Man oh man... Is Satan ever alive and well and filling the minds of the lost and unsaved with nonsense!  The good news, is the devil isn't learning any new tricks.  True, he may gain a soul here or there, but we all know he can never win!  :)

So here's the answer...  As we should all know (and as I detail in my forthcoming book "But is it Biblical?"), the Bible was not, Not, NOT written in the English language.  Genesis happens to have been written in the Hebrew language (specifically Ancient Hebrew).

As I cover in the chapter of my book on "Choosing a Bible", one of the greatest single problems with the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), is that it's TOO TRUSTED for your own good.  What does that mean?  It means that ALL translations of the Bible are exactly that - TRANSLATIONS.  They're not exact, word for word copies of the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic, they have been translated using the most available words in the English language.  Speaking of which, if you ever take a look at the Spanish translations of the Bible, you may wonder how the Gospel message EVER gets across, but somehow it does!  :)

In any event, as I teach in the book, any time you come across a word or an IDEA that makes you scratch your head, the best thing you can do is find an INTERLINEAR BIBLE.  An Interlinear Bible does the exact thing that most people think the Bible is already.  It's an actual word for word translation of the original language - EVEN IF IT DOESN'T MAKE GRAMMATICAL SENSE.  Why would you want to read something that doesn't make sense?  Ah-ha!  Allow me to show you an example.

Here is the "offending" INCORRECT translation from Genesis 1:28:

KJV - And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth...

Interlinear - And He is blessing them Elohim and He is saying to them Elohim be fruitful you and increase you and fill you the earth...

Do you see what I see?  If you do, you can clearly see that the good men who put together the KJV didn't choose the BEST possible word (replenish) in this particular case.  "And fill you the earth" may not make much sense in a grammatical sense, but anyone who understands the English language well enough can clearly understand that God didn't tell them to RE-FILL the earth, He told them to FILL IT UP!

This is one of the many reasons that I prefer to use the New King James Version of the Bible for 99% of my teaching needs.  Sadly much of the poetic nature of the Bible is lost in the NKJV, however MANY of the errors like this one are fixed.

NKJV - Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth"...

Had this particular person had an NKJV around instead of the KJV, they never, Ever, EVER would have had the opportunity to share this most false teaching!