Translation issues in Revelation that could be important.

They involve the Subject of The Beast and comes from chapters 13 and 17.

In Revelation 13:5 the KJV says The Beast will "continue" 42 month.  That reading being my default understanding of the verse had lead me to interpreting it as saying the end of the 42 months must be when the Beast is defeated in Revelation 19 and they begin when the Mortal Wound is healed.  Since the meaning of "Continue" in my mind meant his life and reign being prolonged past the point when it should have ended.

But I recently checked the Young's Literal Translation and it says that The Beast was given authority to "make war" for 42 months.  Now this is not actually a perfectly hyper literal word for word translation because the Greek word for War isn't in the verse, but it is elsewhere in the chapter and associated with The Beast in other chapters.  For example in both Revelation 11:7 and 13:7 the phrase "make war" appears, and in both the word for "make" is the Greek word translated "Continue" in 13:5, in fact the same word is translated lots of other ways as well.

I think the "make war" appearances are actually best translated "wage war".  In 13:7 the waging of war is defined as something The beast is given power or authority to do.  And 13:4 was also about the Beast's prowess in warfare. So it makes sense that what The beast "makes" or "wages" in those other verses is what is probably the context of verse 5.

The next is not a criticism of the KJV, but more the way we casually talk about Revelation 17 that may not even be supported by any actual translation.  And that is how we often refer to the Woman as Riding the Beast.  The Language the text uses is that The Beast is carrying the Woman.  And this difference is significant in terms of who can be presumed to have the agency in this situation.

The third is perhaps not a matter of a single word.  But I'd argued on my prior Blog once that I think the Miracles or Wonders that the later part Revelation 13 attributes to the Second Beast are meant to be believed by those being deceived to be performed by the First Beast.  But I didn't much try to support that with anything in the actual text of Revelation 13 but from inferences drawn by other prophecies I then assumed to be about the same persons.  I'm now more skeptical of a lot of those assumptions about what passages are and aren't about the "Antichrist", but instead have been thinking about what it means that the miracles are performed "in the sight" of The Beast, or "before the beast" in the YLT.

Such language exists in The Hebrew often about the relationship between The LORD and His Prophets or Anointed Ones.  In those contexts it's about how what the Agents of God are able to do what they do because of Power or Authority given to them by God or Jesus.  The natural perversion of that would be a False Prophet attributing his miracles to the person he's seeking to deceive the world into thinking is a god.

However another issue near here is about the Image of The Beast.  The KJV says that the Second Beast convinced the people to "make" an Image of the Beast but other translations say something like "set up" which I think is more accurate looking at the Greek verb itself.  The issue is the "make" translation had at times lead me to think the Image is something that didn't exist already prior to this, but the Greek is actually NOT using a word for create. So it could be referring to doing something with an Image that was already there, or existed somewhere else.