“A virgin shall conceive.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.” “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand.” You have heard every one quoted so often they have stopped needing a second look. But which Bible was the apostle reading when he quoted them? The Hebrew and the Greek do not always agree — and the difference decides what a verse can carry. This companion to The Book of Delusions puts twenty-eight of the most load-bearing passages in the Bible under the microscope, and it does not look away when the columns diverge.

The passages span the whole prophetic spine of the Old Testament: Genesis 3:15 and the seed of the woman; Genesis 49:10, “until Shiloh come”; Deuteronomy 32:8–9, where the scrolls read “sons of God” and the later Hebrew reads “sons of Israel”; Psalm 2, Psalm 16, Psalm 22:16 — “they pierced my hands and my feet” — Psalm 45 and Psalm 110; Isaiah 7:14, the virgin, taken as the model case, and Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the Suffering Servant; Daniel’s Son of Man and the seventy weeks; Hosea’s “out of Egypt”; Micah’s Bethlehem; and Zechariah’s king on a donkey, thirty pieces of silver, and “whom they have pierced.” Each passage receives the same fourfold examination: the Masoretic Hebrew, the Septuagint Greek, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament’s use of them all.

The passages are arranged in the Bible’s own order — Torah, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, the Twelve — and the introduction lays down three honest rules for the examination and states plainly what is not in the book, so nothing is oversold before the evidence starts. Some of the entries will steady a reader’s faith: texts where the scrolls, older than the church itself, stand behind the reading the apostles used. Some will unsettle it: places where a beloved proof text turns out to rest on one column and not the others, and the rating has to say so.

Where the texts disagree, the disagreement goes on the table. Where the Christian reading stands on the Greek against the Hebrew, that is said plainly; where it stands on the Hebrew itself, that is said too. Every finding is rated for what it is a rating of — strong for the text, disputed for the prediction, and so on — and the book closes with a count-up, so the reader always knows exactly how much weight each passage can bear.

If you have ever quoted one of these verses and wondered what is actually underneath it, this is the book that shows you — column by column, rating by rating — and leaves the weighing in your hands.