Exodus 26:9 — KJV uses 'couple' for joining the tabernacle curtains, while NRSVUE and NIV use 'join,' cited as another example of KJV wording diverging from modern translations.

This example does not actually show a lexical crux or scholarly disagreement at all. 'Couple' and 'join' are straightforward synonyms in English for the Hebrew verb חָבַר (chabar, 'to join/unite/couple'), and all three translations (KJV, NRSVUE, NIV) describe an identical construction procedure: five curtains joined as one set, six as another, with the sixth curtain doubled at the tent's front. This is 17th-century versus 21st-century English style, not a translation dispute — 'couple' simply fell out of common use as an ordinary verb for 'join' in modern English. Treating every such stylistic modernization as if it were evidence of substantive inconsistency over-reads ordinary synonym variation as scholarly disagreement, when in fact the technical instructions are preserved identically across every rendering.

The identical technical content survives across 400+ years of English translation and roughly 3,000 years of manuscript transmission for a passage as mundane as tabernacle textile-assembly instructions — a strong data point for the precision with which even non-doctrinal, technical portions of the Pentateuch have been transmitted and translated.