Afore, Before

Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way, Psalm 119:104.

One of the goals of this blog is to teach the average person that the word of God is not some top shelf academic work that requires multiple degrees and loads of commentaries to understand. The King James Bible is a perfectly written and quite easy to read bible once the reader understands that each word is perfectly crafted.

Because it is not written in the sloppy and ever changing dialects of various English-Speaking populations, two generations have been led to believe that it is just too hard to read. This coincides with the general downward educational drift throughout the American educational system.

I just read this morning that the State of Mississippi now has the nation's top reading scores for 4th grade students. For the last few decades, other educators have adjusted the curriculum for incoming students as they tried to reach every student. Reading scores have plummeted across the nation. (Read today's edition of The Free Press.)

For example, the State of Illinois has 30 schools in which not one student is a proficient reader at his grade level. Oregon, one of our wealthiest states and a paragon of enlightened progressive policies now has the lowest reading scores for 4th grade students.

How did Mississippi go from the bottom state in education to achieve such results? When I lived in South Carolina, they used to call themselves the "Thank God for Mississippi State" because South Carolina always came in 49th and Mississippi always came in 50th.

Instead of adjusting the curriculum to the students, Mississippi adjusted the students to the curriculum. Of course, this was the standard way of education for three centuries on the North American Continent. Changing that has been a disaster to the concept of universal education.

Our churches have followed the progressive lead. No matter how fundamental and conservative they claim to be, they have switched the people to bibles geared to the people's current vocabulary. To read a King James Bible requires thought. It doesn't require years of college. Is their any discipline among our people that doesn't require new vocabulary to master?

Can a student learn mechanical skills without first learning basic terms used in the field? Can a student learn mathematics without learning the terms which are building blocks to the field? Can a nursing student grasp anything in a class if they do not learn some basic terms? How cruel would it be to assume that students couldn't adjust to these new terms and so we rewrote the text books to reflect their current vocabulary? Why do we do that with the bible?

I firmly believe that if someone were to take a sampling of ten people from ten churches using the new bibles, and then take a sampling of ten people from churches still using a King James Bible, there would be a wide gap in the basic bible knowledge of each group. The new bible churches who were sold the concept that they would understand their bibles better, will never be able to compete with those churches that have kept the King James bible any better than Oregon's 4th grade students could compete with Mississippi's 4th grade readers.

What sounded so good to Oregon's educators two decades ago, and what some of them would still argue for despite its failure, has set back an entire generation of its students.

I wrote all of that to get to the following message I received. A young mother from the Black Creek Baptist Church pastored by Timothy McVey studied out the two words "afore" and "before". Despite home schooling one child, training a toddler, and nursing a new born, she spent some time looking at each word in context. She didn't panic over archaic language. She didn't consider herself too dumb to understand. She trusted that her bible would always be consistent when it used vocabulary and so she looked up each word in context and wrote the following gem:

Afore - is always referring to time in the KJB. Today, we would say before, like, I will eat dinner before I go to church. In the Bible, it would be, I will eat my dinner afore I go to church.

Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up: Psalms 129:6.

(Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures,) Romans 1:2.

Before - is positional in the KJB. Ahead of something, in front of something or someone.. Like to do something before the Lord would be to have it be in front of him or for him. "Worship before the Lord."

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18.

And David said unto Michal, It was before the LORD, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel: therefore will I play before the LORD. 2 Samuel 6:21.

Just another example of the precision of the use of words in the KJB. Today we would just eliminate afore and substitute it with before but leaving them exactly as they are gives us a more precise understanding of what the Bible is

telling us.

At the end of the the above message she asked the following question:

Did I get it right? Despite being probably poorly written..

What do my readers think?