Barry Hofstetter wrote:At the risk of sounding like a KJV defender, I don't think that "behold" was a mistranslation when the KJV went to press. I think the KJV translators, who had a good sense of the English of their times, thought it captured the range of usage we see for ἰδοὺ. The OED has simply:
Look again. The bible is the earliest source they have:
OED wrote:The imperative of the preceding verb, used to call attention; = lo int.1
[c1440 York Myst. xx. 193 Be-halde howe he alleggis oure lawe.]
1535 Bible (Coverdale) Mal. iii. 1 Beholde, I will send my messaunger.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream i. i. 147 Beholde, The iawes of darkenesse do deuoure it vp.
a1764 R. Lloyd Dialogue in Wks. II. 2 Behold! to yours and my surprize, These trifles to a volume rise.
1831 T. Carlyle Sartor Resartus iii. viii, Fortunatus‥when he‥wished himself Anywhere, behold he was There.
The bracketed citations, "... are not actual instances of our word, but quotations which give some information about related words at a time before mammoth itself is first recorded in English." What was an accurate translation in the KJV was their use of the word "lo," which goes back to Old English and has since died out, which today we use only in the phrase "lo and behold," but the earliest citation of that is from 1808. Actually "lo" continues in "look" today, which it was derived from anyway.
But the presentation "here" usage existed at least as far back as AD970. The fact that the KJV translators chose "lo" and "behold" rather than "lo" and "here" for translating ἰδοὺ just shows they were translating etymology rather than usage.
David Lim wrote: Anyway neither am I a KJV reader, so I do not know where I got my version of "behold" from..
You got it from whatever introductory grammar you learned from and how they glossed it--even BDAG gets it wrong.