Because we have no idea what it actually says. You are reading a translation of a translation of a translation, and so on. Andrew Sullivan highlighted the difficulty of this over the weekend with this piece, on the first bible to be translated into the Inuit language:
[A]dapting the Old Testament, with its litany of desert vegetation and animals, to an Arctic readership presented challenges. For one, there are no words in Inuktitut for “goat,” “sheep” or “camel.” Those had to be written phonetically. And what to do about the 30-plus types of trees mentioned in the Bible when there are no trees of any kind for hundreds of miles in the Arctic?
“We used a general term for tree,” explained Allooloo, “and then explained it in the footnotes.” The translation brims with footnotes and explications. The same word was used for “shepherd” as for someone who tends a dog team. “It’s like ‘baby sitter,'” said Arreak. Similarly, “pomegranate” is described as a sweet fruit with many seeds.
This kind of thing isn’t uncommon in English language bibles, because a lot of things simply don’t translate properly between Hebrew and English. Translators often had to just do their best, using context clues to figure out intended meanings in the case of multiple possibilities, adapting wording such that an English equivalent could be found, etc. This isn’t to say that translators were somehow acting in bad faith, purposely trying to alter the bible’s context, just that you run into these kind of problems translating between vastly different languages.
The result is an imperfect product full of lots of judgement calls, best guesses, and human error. It is fallible.
I’m not saying no one should believe it, that it’s wrong, etc. I just want to make the point that, if you’re going to base something on a literal word-for-word reading of scripture, you may be reading something that was altered in translation, and should keep that in mind.
520 Chestnut 
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