{I was apparently composing a reply to your post when it was still on another thread before its split. So this post resulted in a duplicate.}
I expected a thread beginning with Eric Dubay and the Flat Earth Society and an alleged “paleontology conspiracy” to go quickly off the rails. Yet, against my better judgment, I am going to weigh in (briefly, with just one response) before the various tangents get any more strange than they already are.
As to the image entitled, “Serious Errors in the Bible”, I’m not particularly interested in debating the entire Bible inerrancy topic but I do groan a bit when these four well-worn Internet-popular tropes are bandied about when each of them betrays a lack of basic linguistics knowledge which should be easily grasped by an ungraduate major in that field (assuming they’ve completed the appropriate 300-level courses.) Before I briefly explain, I’ll further set the table with this:
I agree that the aforementioned passages have absolutely nothing to do with dinosaurs. Indeed, nothing about them points to dinosaurs. Nevertheless, your argument is deeply flawed. Even though the word dinosaur was not coined until 1842, that doesn’t automatically render impossible a discovery of similar fossils by some ancient people which might have led them to assume that such beasts existed (or even continued to exist in their day.) Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter what those ancient peoples might have called those beasts. Tangible things in the real world don’t rely on their linguistic labels for their existence. Labels are no more than that: a convenience, a way for humans to refer to something using a term an audience understands in at least a general way.
No. Not even close. Just as anti-evolution creationists often demonstrate negligible knowledge of evolutionary processes and knowledge, far too many Bible-bashers display similar shortcomings in the basics of linguistics and translation. I will turn to a few specifics momentarily but first I can’t help but enjoy this conspiracy theory handwaving:
I will admit that I sometimes may be guilty of enjoying a well-spun conspiracy theory tale almost as much as those who truly believe them but I spent too many years involved professionally in the scholarship of ancient languages and their translation to let these fun but misinformed classics slip by unanswered. I will be brief because I’ve covered these in depth on multiple occasions on this Peaceful Science forum (and many others) or the past several years:
(1) “The Fowl has four legs Leviticus 11:20-21”
The underlying Hebrew word was translated as “fowls” by the KJV Bible translators of 1611 because “flying winged creature” doesn’t read all that smoothly. Most translations after 1611 have tended to use words like “winged insects” for two reasons: (a) the ancient Hebrews referred to just about all flying creatures (whether they be birds, insects, or bats) using the same noun label, and (b) the surrounding context of Leviticus 11:20-21 point towards the winged insect subset of that Hebrew word `OPH.
The KJV translators did a reasonably good job considering the paucity of Hebrew lexiocographical tools available to them from the late 16th and early 17th century but it is laughable to suggest that they produced a better rendering of this passage than all of the better equipped tanslators of the centuries which followed. (Facts and sound scholarship explain these differences, not lame conspiracy theories.)
(2) “The Bat is a Bird. Leviticus 11:13 &19”
First, please note the implied significant elipsis between Leviticus 11:13 and 11:19. No doubt that great distance helps explains why Bible translators have tended to use the concise and convenient word “bird” instead of the more technically accurate English equivalent, “winged creature” (which would have treated bats more comfortably according to the taxonomy conventions of modern English. Secondly, now that you know that the underlying Hebrew word is `OPH (“winged creature”) as explained in #1 above, you should abandon the silly conspiracy theory explanation.
Oops. I had planned to go ahead and debunk the other two items in the meme image but I just had a pop-up reminder that I have a dinner appointment so I’m going to leave the 3rd and 4th claims of the image to a quick search for my posts on them in the Peaceful Science archives. (Besides, I don’t enjoy repeating myself fielding the same old conspiracy theory arguments.)