Bible Verses
Translation comparison

Numbers 32:26 in 6 translations

6 distinct wordings, grouped by what each translation is trying to do. Differences from the King James text are marked below.

Early modern English

Seventeenth-century wording and sentence shape. Familiar, rhythmic, and the version most quotations you have heard are taken from.

King James Version
KJV

Our little ones, our wives, our flocks, and all our cattle, shall be there in the cities of Gilead:

1611 / 1769 · Public domain · The Authorised Version, revised to the 1769 Blayney text. Includes the Apocrypha as printed in 1611.

Literal, word-for-word

Follows Hebrew and Greek word order and grammar closely, even where the English becomes stiff. Useful for seeing what the underlying sentence is doing.

American Standard Version
ASV

Our little ones, our wives, our flocks, and all our cattle, shall be there in the cities of Gilead;

1901 · Public domain · The American revision of the English Revised Version. Deliberately literal, and the base text behind several later translations.

Darby Bible
DARBY

Our little ones, our wives, our cattle, and all our beasts shall be there in the cities of Gilead;

1890 · Public domain · John Nelson Darby's translation, made for close study rather than public reading. Often exposes grammatical detail other versions smooth over.

Young's Literal Translation
YLT

our infants, our wives, our cattle, and all our beasts, are there in cities of Gilead,

1898 · Public domain · The most extreme word-for-word rendering here, keeping Hebrew and Greek tense and word order at the cost of natural English.

Modern English

Contemporary vocabulary and punctuation, aiming for the sentence a present-day reader would write while staying close to the source.

World English Bible
WEB

Our little ones, our wives, our flocks, and all our livestock, shall be there in the cities of Gilead;

2000s · Public domain · A modern-English update of the ASV. Reads close to contemporary speech while staying in the literal tradition. Includes the Apocrypha.

Simplified English

Built from a deliberately small vocabulary so the sense stays reachable for new readers and non-native speakers. Trades nuance for clarity.

Bible in Basic English
BBE

Our little ones, our wives, and our flocks, and all our cattle, will be there in the towns of Gilead;

1949 · Public domain · Written with roughly a thousand basic English words plus a small Bible vocabulary. The plainest reading available here.

What changes between the King James and modern wording

The modern rendering is printed below with every word that differs from the King James text marked, so the actual divergence is visible rather than left for you to spot.

Our little ones, our wives, our flocks, and all our livestock, shall be there in the cities of Gilead:

Word-for-word swaps

  • cattlelivestock

The verses either side

King James text. A comparison is easier to judge when you can see the sentence the verse sits inside.

Not shown for this verse: Open English Bible (US), Open English Bible (Commonwealth). Those translations are still incomplete in the corpus, and empty cards are not padded in.