2 Kings 17:16 — KJV translates Hebrew asherah as 'a grove' (of trees), while NRSVUE has 'a sacred pole' and NIV 'an Asherah pole'; the spreadsheet notes the KJV 'didn't know about Asherah' and that the Hebrew phrase does not mean a grove of trees.

Concede this fully — 'grove' for asherah is a genuine translation deficiency, not a defensible stylistic choice. The 1611 translators, following the LXX's ἄλσος ('grove') and Vulgate's lucus, lacked the epigraphic and archaeological evidence that later clarified the term: the Ugaritic tablets from Ras Shamra (discovered 1929) established Asherah as a major Canaanite goddess, and the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions (discovered 1975-76, referencing 'Yahweh and his Asherah') confirmed Asherah's cultic pole/symbol was a specific, named object tied to syncretistic worship, not generically 'trees'. This is a real and significant improvement in comparative Semitic philology that postdates the KJV by over three centuries. Crucially, though, the moral-historical claim of 2 Kings 17:16 is unaffected either way: the passage condemns Israel's adoption of a specific Canaanite cultic object/deity-symbol alongside Baal worship, and that condemnation reads identically whether the English says 'grove' or 'Asherah pole'. Modern critical translations fixed the gloss using the very same Masoretic Hebrew text the KJV used — no new manuscript discovery altered the underlying reading, only the interpretive tools brought to it.

That NRSVUE and NIV corrected this using the identical Hebrew consonantal text is itself evidence of the self-correcting rigor of ongoing textual and philological scholarship: errors get fixed by better evidence and method, not by altering the transmitted text, which argues for the discipline's integrity rather than against scripture's reliability.