The popular misunderstanding of the naming and counting of insect appendages (a topic of amusement on many anti-Bible websites) is one of my personal favorites and I’ve often used it as a classroom illustration of translation complexities. I did a quick a search on PS and found that I last posted on this topic in February:
One other thought: The Ancients Weren’t Stupid.
We moderns immediately jump to the conclusions that the ancients were in error when something doesn’t make sense to us. My favorite example is the silly complaint that the Bible is wrong about the number of legs on a grasshopper. Do we really think it likely that the ancients were unable to count the appendages of a pest which could spell the difference between feast and famine? Seriously? (See the Skeptics Annoted Bible for yet another idiotic face-palm.)
Any competent comparative linguist can explain that cultures classify and label things differently. We today may look at a grasshopper and see six legs—but someone in another cultures sees four appendages of virtually identical structure and calls them “legs” while noticing two very different and very large appendages toward the posterior and calls them “springs” or “jumpers.” (After all, those two big things in the back don’t look anything like the four in the front and the grasshopper doesn’t use them in the same way.) So one culture may speak of six legs while the others describes the same six appendages as four legs and two jumpers. If we could interview native speakers of that ancient culture, we could easily resolve such issues. Our alternative is to assume that ancient writers were somehow incapable of counting appendages on a insect very familiar within their everyday lives.