Mark Ward's "False Friends" Are Nothing of the Sort

At the request of several friends, I decided to read Mark Ward’s book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible. In that book Ward takes the position that using the KJV for anything other than personal study is a sin. Ward wrote: “For public preaching ministry, for evangelism, for discipleship materials, indeed for most situations outside individual study, using the KJV violates Paul’s instructions in I Corinthians 14.”

In a debate with Dan Haifley, Ward was asked if he thought it was a sin to give a KJV to a child. Ward stated in no uncertain terms that he does think it is a sin to give the KJV to a child. He said,

There comes a point at which, actually, it is a sin for a given Bible translation to be handed to children. I’m saying we’ve reached the point where there’s a sufficient number of readability difficulties that it’s time to turn away from the King James in institutional contexts. Would I say it’s a sin to hand to your child? Here’s what I’d say: according to the King James, “to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” What can I do brothers and sisters other than apply the teaching of I Corinthians 14? Does edification require intelligibility? If so, then you know, it’s between you and God whether it’s a sin or not, but don’t do it! Don’t hand unintelligible words to your children.
 
Ward’s conclusion that using the KJV is a sin is based in large part on his claim that the KJV is unintelligible. Ward claims that the language of the KJV is so antiquated that modern American readers are practically incapable of understanding it. And, at least according to Ward, the leading cause of this unintelligibility is the KJV’s use of words that no longer mean today what they meant in the seventeenth century. Ward calls these words “false friends,” and he wrote of them that
 
The biggest problem in understanding the KJV comes from “false friends,” words that are still in common use but have changed meaning in ways that modern readers are highly unlikely to recognize. Many words and phrases in the KJV are still in use but meant different things in seventeenth-century England.
 
This “false friends” argument is the primary weapon that Ward uses to attack the KJV. At the time of this writing, he claims to have found about 100 different words and phrases in the KJV that modern readers cannot understand because those words and phrases no longer mean what they meant in the past. This is Ward’s primary argument, and I’ve watched in consternation as many of my friends have been swayed by it. Even those who disagree with Ward’s conclusion that using the KJV is a sin have often agreed with his claim that there are “false friends” in the KJV.
 
One of the reasons that I find this state of things concerning is that Ward isn’t anything even close to an expert on modern American literature. He has no idea whatsoever whether any of his “false friends” even belong on his list. He is completely dependent on dictionaries to tell him if a word or phrase is archaic, and as I demonstrated in a recent discussion with him, he doesn’t even understand how to use a dictionary properly. His claim has taken him far outside his field of expertise.
 
Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with other projects, and I did not have the time to address Ward’s argument when I was first made aware of it. I wish I had. Perhaps I could have prevented some of my friends from being deceived by Ward’s pretentiously pusillanimous style of argument. In any case, I’ve decided to devote more time to this issue now, and I trust that my efforts will help undo some of the damage that has already been done.
 
Unlike Ward, I am uniquely qualified to address the claim that the KJV uses words and phrases that either have passed entirely out of use or have changed meanings so much that they cannot be properly understood. I am qualified for this task because I have read well over 10,000 books in my lifetime. I did this by reading an average of three books a day over a period of ten years. Of course, I kept reading after that ten-year period, but I stopped counting. The books that I’ve read cover a wide range of dates and genres, and I can count myself among the miniscule percentage of Americans who are experts on English literature simply because they have read so much of it.
 
Because I have read so many books, I can say with absolute certainty that Ward’s “false friends” argument is completely and utterly false. The KJV is not riddled with words that are no longer used in today’s literature, nor is it filled with words that no longer mean what they meant when the KJV was translated. Ward’s “false friends” argument is nothing more than a grand display of his own ignorance.
 
I hope to eventually demonstrate the folly of Ward’s claim by citing examples from modern literature of each and every word in his list being used in the same sense that it carries in the KJV. Of course, this project will take some time to complete, but I’ll begin today with the word halt.
 
Ward claims that the verb halt means “stop” in today’s English and that it meant “limp” in the seventeenth century. He is only partly correct in this. There is a difference between halt and limp, but I’ll come back to that later. According to Ward, this word makes the KJV unintelligible and therefore sinful to use because modern readers only understand the word halt as a synonym for stop.

This claim is simply preposterous. Are there many people today who only understand the word halt as a synonym for stop? Sure there are, but there are also many who understand that halt could also be a synonym for limp. There are literally thousands of examples of halt being used this way in modern literature.
 
To demonstrate this, I used Google Books to search for books containing both the word halting and the word limping. I chose these search terms specifically to lower the number of results that would be returned. I also set the date parameter to return books written between 1980 and 2024 to limit the search to books written within my lifetime. I then spent about an hour looking through the results and found many instances of the word halt being used as a synonym for limp. Here is a sample of the results:
 
“He got up from the chair and started toward her, and she took a few halting, limping steps, and before he knew it she was in his embrace.” —Donna Alward, Someone to Love, 2017
 
“I hugged her goodbye, and then made my halting, limping way into the house.” —Dean Murray, Broken, 2011
 
“He came from God, and spoke as one divine; not as human, hesitating, halting, limping expounders like the scribes.” —Rupert Lothian, Who Is This Man?, 2016
 
“He takes halting, limping steps toward you and holds out his hand.” —Jay Leibold, Revenge of the Russian Ghost, 1990 (Juvenile Fiction)
 
“[P]oor broken-backed, halting, limping, club-footed . . .” —A.G. Riddle, Bart Ridgeley, 2018
 
“[B]ut change is coming, if slowly, and on halting, limping feet.” —Michael Bryson, The Atheist Milton, 2012
 
“Here was an invisible man in most people’s eyes. They would see the hump, the halting, the limping gate and badly scarred head and neck and turn their eyes.” —J.S. Witte, The Rescue of Charles de Simpson, 2018
 
“As I continued the slow halting limping walk out of the dimly lit sewerage works, carefully avoiding obstacles . . .” —Trevor L. White, Dangerous Dollars, 2012
 
“Bowyer ‘limps, and he limps, & he devoures more French ground at two paces.’ The repetition makes Bowyer’s body both excessive and notable, reproducing the halting rhythm of his gait . . .” —Katherine Schaap Williams, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater, 2021
 
“It is a halting, limping off-beat harmony—some laborious & slow recovery.” —Henry Gould, Lanthanum, 2011
 
“The whole group was regulated by the halting, limping gait of men scarcely able to drag themselves along.” —W. Crispin Sheppard, Don Hale Over There, 2023
 
“So here he was to pick up da fine pieces, confoundedly, of a halting limping romance that niver was, and niver would be!” —John Tan, The Religious Hysteria of Doctor Humphrey Humperdinck, 2014
 
“His once-powerful strides were now limited to a halting limp.” —Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul, 2005
 
“Carlos shrugged and slowly crawled out of the back of the wagon. He took a few halting, limping steps and stopped.” —Giles Tippette, The Horse Thieves, 1993
 
“It was as if two human currents were setting past each other; one strong and vigorous, making all haste to reach the scene of action; the other feeble and halting, limping back to the rear.” —Elias Porter Pellet, History of the 114th Regiment, 1995
 
“Now he must go through life halting, limping.” —Samuel Dickey Gordon, The Healing Christ, 1985
 
“They demanded a halting, limping, irregular pace.” —John Hersey, The Wall, 1981
 
“The halting, limping, monotonous feature is most often written by one who looks at his or her notes to find the material for a sentence, writes it, looks back for more material for another sentence, writes it, and on and on.” —William L. Rivers, News in Print, 1984
 
“He passed through them, a halting, limping congregation of old women clutching one another’s arms in support.” —Tom Molloy, The Green Line, 1982
 
“First, its heavy, uneven, off-balance alternation of two chords suggests a limping gait. Instead of moving purposefully and smoothly toward a predetermined goal, this music trudges haltingly, making little or no progress.” —Blake Howe et al., The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, 2015
 
“The narrator of Sonnet 66 complains its ‘strength [is] by limping sway disabled,’ a phrase that potentially defines disability in medicalized terms, the halting gait of a strong body with an enfeebled limb.” —Sujata Lyengar, Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, 2014
 
“He walked in a halting, limping gait and seemed to be filled with purpose.” —Susan Sleeman, Silent Sabotage, 2016
 
As you can see, Ward’s claim that halt is no longer used as a synonym for limp can be thoroughly demonstrated to be false. There are literally thousands of examples of halt being used in this manner in books published during my lifetime, but why limit ourselves to books? When Ward wrote an article a few years back defending his claims about the word halt, he said that he used the NOW Corpus to search news publications and looked at “many dozens of uses of halt” without finding a single use of halt to mean limp. I’m not sure how well Ward understands the NOW Corpus, but I repeated his search and found several instances of halt being used as a synonym for limp.
 
For example, one week before Ward wrote the above-referenced article, the New York Post published an article about baseball legend Buddy Harrelson’s battle with Alzheimer’s. In that article, they said of Harrelson that “when he speaks, the words are halting and unsure.” Three days prior to that, New York Magazine published a feature about YouTube sensation Poppy in which they said that “she’s still doing an exaggerated fembot voice, and she’s prone to a halting way of forming sentences, as if her computer brain were whirring away.” There are several more examples that could be given of halt being used in this sense just in the months prior to Ward’s claim that he couldn’t find any such examples, but what kind of results would we find if we searched for uses of the word halt on Google News instead of using a tool that most people have never even heard of? Here are a few examples of what a Google News search found:

“Many Democrats believed Biden’s bumbling debate performance and halting push to clean it up made his path to re-election impossible. ‘I have decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,’ Biden said in remarks delivered in a low tone and, at times, in a halting fashion.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/oval-office-address-biden-frame-2024-decision-defense-democracy-rcna163529
 
“Biden’s halting and bumbling showing in the June 27 debate further raised questions about his fitness to serve another four years.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/28/kamala-harris-brings-in-200-million-in-first-week-of-her-candidacy-00171525
 
“Mr. Dana remains best known for Jiménez, whose gentle earnestness, halting sentences and apparent lack of common sense—which some critics said played to ethnic stereotypes—burst onto television in 1959.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/bill-dana-comedian-behind-the-bumbling-1960s-character-jose-jimenez-dies-at-92/2017/06/19/90f56b84-5500-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html
 
“But there is something tragic about seeing a young superstar transformed from what Sheinin and Clarke call ‘an Olympic-caliber athlete’ into ‘a halting, limping man who has been sacked four times per game this season and who seems to get up more gingerly with each crushing blow.’”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/end-rg3-tim-cavanaugh/
 
“Two years later, the DCHA is making only halting progress.”
https://ggwash.org/view/97236/dcs-public-housing-agency-is-making-halting-progress-but-much-more-needs-to-be-done
 
“Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/health/mrna-vaccine.html
 
“Title IX timeline: 50 years of halting progress across U.S.”
https://apnews.com/article/title-ix-timeline-5fc023ca41d7d8c2489de24a23413938
 
“Atul Gawande’s announcement last week that he was stepping down as CEO of a high-profile health venture created by the leaders of Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway, came after a frustrating two years marked by high turnover in key positions, potential duplication with the work of one of its founding companies, and halting progress toward its goals, a STAT examination has found.”
https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/20/atul-gawande-haven-halting-progress-high-turnover-preceded-exit-as-ceo/
 
“Turbocharge the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change, two landmark 2015 agreements that have seen halting progress and missed milestones.”
https://unsdg.un.org/latest/stories/pact-future-world-leaders-pledge-action-peace-sustainable-development
 
“More than most, 2021 was a year of mixed results—an endless scroll of gains and losses, halting progress and hard retrenchment.”
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1064273080/for-the-jazz-community-2021-proved-that-improvisation-is-a-life-strategy
 
“A raspy and sometimes halting President Joe Biden tried repeatedly to confront Donald Trump in their first debate ahead of the November election.”
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2024/a-halting-biden-tries-to-confront-trump-at-debate-but-sparks-democratic-anxiety-about-his-candidacy/
 
“Millions of Americans saw one Joe Biden on Thursday night: halting, hesitant, meandering and looking burdened by every one of his 81 years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06/28/us/trump-biden-debate
 
As you can see, halt still carries the same meaning today that it had all the way back in the practically pre-historic days of the KJV translators. But wait! Maybe I found those results because Google has been monitoring my internet activity and listening to my conversations. Maybe we should run another search through the NOW Corpus just to be sure that Google didn’t tweak the results to fit my avatar. If you were to search for variations of the word halt on the NOW Corpus today, you would get results like this:

At this point, it should be abundantly clear that Ward’s claims regarding halt are just plain silly. You would think that Ward would have at least consulted with a literature expert before identifying this word as “the key example” of his “false friends” argument. Doing so would have saved him from the embarrassing realization that his “central example” stubbornly disproves his argument.
 
I mentioned earlier that I would talk more about the difference between halt and limp. I’ve read at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of uses of these two words in literature dating as far back as the sixteenth century. In my personal analysis of that usage, halt focuses on the act of stopping while limp focuses on the act of moving. If an author writes of a man walking with halting steps, he is most likely drawing the reader’s attention to all the times that the man’s progress is stopped. On the other hand, if an author writes of a man limping forward, he is probably drawing the reader’s attention to the man’s progression toward his goal in spite of a hindrance. These two words are not true synonyms. They can be used to refer to the same condition, but they approach it from two different angles.
 
Given this distinction, we could conclude that those who read “how long halt ye between two opinions?” in I Kings 18:21 are not really wrong to think that it means “how long stop ye between two opinions?” I would say that they have missed the fullness of understanding possible from studying the word halt as well as the Hebrew word from which it is translated, but that doesn’t make them wrong in what they do understand.
 
If he is honest, Ward will actually agree with me on this point, and in fact, he has agreed with me already. In the article defending his choice to label halt as a “false friend,” Ward said that the confusion over the word halt in I Kings 18:21 could be solved if we were to “translate the overall meaning of the phrase and say, ‘How long are you going to be paralyzed by indecision?’ like the NET Bible.” Paralysis is not a form of limping. It is a form of stopping. The NET Bible did not translate this verse in a way that speaks of Israel limping from one opinion to another. They translated it as Israel stopping and standing paralyzed between two opinions. Thus, Mark Ward himself admits that it is perfectly acceptable to understand the word halt in this verse as a synonym for stop, and thus, Ward’s foremost example of a “false friend” in the KJV is not a “false friend” at all.  It is a perfectly normal and very modern word that still carries the same range of meanings that it had in the seventeenth century.

Click here to read about more words that are not "false friends" in the KJV.

Addendum:

Mark ward responded to this article both in the comments below and on Facebook where we engaged in a short debate.  During the course of the discussion, Ward admitted that he had known since his teen years that halt could mean limp.  That admission stands in stark contrast to what Ward said in his video about the word halt.  In the video, he said, "I personally am certain that I have never heard or read a contemporary English speaker using halt to mean limp."  I appreciate Ward admitting his lie in a semi-public forum, and I pray that he will humble himself enough to post a video to his YouTube channel confessing his error to his followers.  In the mean time, here's a copy of the debate from Facebook:

Mark:
I agree that the adjective “halting”—especially when used to modify “walk” or “gait” or “pace”—can still mean “limping” in contemporary English.

But …

1) The OED specifically names the relevant sense of the verb “halt”—“intransitive. To be lame, walk lame, limp”—as archaic. Why?

2) Bill did not provide any citations of the intransitive verb. In every case, he gave the adjectival form: “halting.” Why?

3) In fact, 91% of KJVO pastors polled did not get this right at the KJB Study Project. Why did they miss it? I myself misunderstood this my whole life until I read the ESV. Why?

If someone really wanted to torpedo my view in the eyes of others, he might point out that sense 3 of “halt” in the OED gives “To walk unsteadily or hesitatingly; to waver, vacillate, oscillate; to remain in doubt.”

I think, however, that this is the sense of the phrase and not of the word. That is confirmed, in my mind, by the fact that all of the sample uses but one use the phrase: “halt between x and x.” Also, the Hebrew word most naturally means “limp,” according to HALOT and DCH.

When the sense of the Hebrew or Greek word matches an archaic or obsolete sense of the KJV English word, we effectively always have a false friend.

Bill:
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I will break my reply into sections corresponding to your initial admission and each of your three points.

Initial Admission:

You wrote: "I agree that the adjective 'halting'—especially when used to modify 'walk' or 'gait' or 'pace'—can still mean 'limping' in contemporary English."

I appreciate you admitting that. Are you willing to publish retractions telling your readers and viewers that you were wrong? You previously claimed that you could not find a single modern use of "halt" in which it meant "limp." Now that I've shown you how to use Google Books, Google News, and the NOW Corpus to find these examples, are you man enough to tell your followers that you were misled by your own ignorance?

Question 1

You wrote: "The OED specifically names the relevant sense of the verb 'halt'—'intransitive. To be lame, walk lame, limp'—as archaic. Why?"

I'm surprised that you have to ask this. Did you neglect to look up the labels of your preferred dictionary before making claims about them? Let me help you out. According to Oxford Languages, the label "archaic" is applied to words that you might find "in some old-fashioned or historical contexts, such as films set in the past or religious books, but probably not in ordinary English, unless they are used to give a literary or humorous effect."

This means that words labeled as archaic in the OED are still in use in modern English, but the editors have decided that the majority of those uses are either historical, or affectatious. My examples demonstrate that "halt" is used as a synonym for "limp" quite frequently today even in non-historical and non-affectatious ways and should not be labeled archaic, but that is what the OED means by that particular label.

Question 2

You wrote: "Bill did not provide any citations of the intransitive verb. In every case, he gave the adjectival form: 'halting.' Why?"

Because I thought better of you and did not anticipate that you would have such a fallacious response to correction. I admit that was a failure on my part, and I will do my best not to repeat it.

By asking this question, you are committing the logical fallacy of moving the goalpost. Nowhere in your book did you even use the word "intransitive" much less claim that "halt" means something different when it is used intransitively. You simply claimed that modern readers are highly unlikely to recognize it as a synonym for "limp." In the article that you wrote defending "halt" as your central example of a false friend, you said that you couldn't find a single modern use of "halt" as a synonym for "limp." And in your article written for the OED, you asked, "Did you know that halt ... and dozens of other words could mean in 1611 things they cannot mean today?" I have never read or heard anything from you where you claimed that "halt" still means "limp" today, but only when it is used transitively.

To be honest, I'm actually glad that you never said that before, since if you had, I would have struggled greatly with the temptation to mock you mercilessly. Unfortunately, you've now decided to move the goalpost after realizing how easy it was for anyone with internet access to prove you wrong. I will pray that you find the strength to repent as I also pray that God will give me the strength to refrain from mocking your ignorance.

Oh, by the way, here are several examples of "halt" being used intransitively as a synonym for "limp:"

"'...threatens the entire hospital system in Massachusetts,' Lopez said, his voice halting as he struggled to find the right words" - https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/07/31/two-steward-properties-in-massachusetts-can-close-bankruptcy-judge-rules/

"'It was really tough,' Mary Ann Giordano said, her voice halting as she described Frankie's eight-monthlong ordeal. 'But she made it.'" - https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/at-westminster-dog-show-a-display-of-dogs-and-devotion-1.6885463

"It was during this emotional testimony that Ms. Holmes's composure broke, her voice halting as she spoke through tears." - https://www.biznews.com/global-citizen/2022/01/04/california-industrial-scale-fraud

"'I think it was from Jeff,' Mininger testified, his voice halting as he recalled the tragedy. 'The crash and the scream were together.'" - https://www.pottsmerc.com/news/driver-who-struck-road-crew-convicted-of-vehicular-homicide/article_55ae43a2-4446-11e9-b908-f737bf3cab5d.html

"Austin said in a brief interview with ESPN, his voice halting as he fought back tears. 'The draft is four days away...'" - http://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/2014/06/23/nba_genetic_disorder_ends_draft_prospects_career.html

"'My...my mother paid?' she said, her words halting as she spoke." - Dan Morrow, A Heartbeat in Danger, 2021

"Halting toward me was a zombie." - Geoffrey Wolff, "Heavy Lifting," Our Fathers: Reflections by Sons, 2001

Question 3

You wrote: "In fact, 91% of KJVO pastors polled did not get this right at the KJB Study Project. Why did they miss it? I myself misunderstood this my whole life until I read the ESV. Why?"

I'm glad that you brought up your survey in this context. Do you remember way back a whole year and a half in the past when you responded to another one of my articles? At the end of that response, you said:

"In your review, you made highly contestable, rather confused denials of three of my KJV false friends (I don’t actually call “unicorn” a false friend). I’ve got 68 more false friends (so far); I’d encourage you to at least pick a sufficient sample size."

I chose to ignore that comment at the time, but I think it would be appropriate to respond to it here.

There are about 200,000 pastors that use the KJV in America alone. That number doesn't include the thousands in the UK, Australia, Canada, India, or anywhere else where one might find an English speaking church. Your sample size to represent this huge population of pastors was a mere 100. That's less than a tenth of a percent of the total.

My "sample size," on the other hand, was 4 (yes, you did list "unicorn" as a "false friend" in your book) out of 72 which is 5.6 percent of the total. My sample percentage is two whole orders of magnitude greater than yours, and you're complaining that I didn't pick a sufficient sample size.

By the way, there are many other problems with your survey. I don't have time to cover all of them here, but I'll list a few in no particular order.

1) I find it suspicious that you did not mention your process for selecting the 100 pastors that were called. Were they chosen at random, or did you call pastors that you suspected would give the answers you wanted? Did you take any steps to guarantee that the sample would be a true representation of the whole? Did you adequately control for all the factors that might have influenced the answers from your sample group? These are fundamental questions that should have been answered before your results were published.

2) The questions were not properly crafted to test your hypothesis.

3) The telephone format did not allow you to control the environment around the participants.

4) It is suspicious that you published the education levels and the positions held by the respondents, but you did not publish the effect that these two demographic categories had on the results.

5) It is suspicious that you intentionally did not interview men with Ph.D. degrees. You explained this by saying that "effort was made to reach out to standard pastors," but there are pastors who hold Ph.D. degrees. Plus, 25% of the people you did reach out to were not pastors.

I have read hundreds of studies across at least a dozen specialties, and the flaws in your methodology and reporting have raised huge red flags in my mind. As a researcher, I could never feel comfortable relying on the data from your study in any thing that is published with my name on it.

Mark:
The only citation I see that clearly uses "halt" as an intransitive verb to mean "limp" is "Halting toward me was a zombie." That's a catch. You get a point there. I don't believe that any of your other citations is relevant. I knew and used the adjective "halting" as a kid/teen, but I did not connect that adjective to the intransitive verb "How long halt ye."

Several of the participants in the survey told us they had earned doctorates. You can see that fact among the demographic data. I will ask my partner in this work if he can generate a graph showing the effect of education on people's answers. That was not a purposeful omission on my part; that's actually a very good idea. I do not know the answer, and I would like to. However, if it requires a PhD to read the KJV well, I think I've won the debate.

If you do not like the way I constructed my survey, I welcome you doing a bigger and better one. It was very difficult and time-consuming to call 100 KJV-Only pastors. They were chosen to represent as many of the major KJV-Only schools as possible. I asked my helpers to find men who represented the average pastor. One volunteer at one school ended up talking to the school's top brass instead (all of them trained to be pastors, all of them trainers of pastors, some of them pastors themselves), and I almost disallowed this. But it seemed to me that allowing a few better-trained men in would actually help me avoid the charge of picking weak participants on purpose.

I did not perform this survey with academic standards in mind, because I did not and do not have academic resources. I sought grant funding but was denied thrice. Again, I would *gladly* help someone else with grant funding to do this kind of work in an even more rigorous way.

Bill:
Okay, let's see if I can say this without mocking you too much. I'm sure it's not your fault that you have no idea how verbs and participles work. You only have a Ph.D. in New Testament Interpretation after all. It's not like you've studied English grammar. As such, you might be surprised to learn that participles derived from intransitive verbs remain intransitive by nature, because they do not govern an object directly. Thus, the participle "halting" is just as intransitive as the verb from which it comes.

However, if you really, really, really want to insist that the only way modern readers could understand the word "halt" in the Bible is by reading it as an intransitive verb in modern literature, then I guess I'll just have to point out that there are several examples of this usage in modern literature too. For instance:

"I heard a tramping noise outside my door and peeked out. There was an infernal queue of zombie-like safety and quality Nazis halting toward me…each carrying a DVD, or murmuring a Web site’s URL." - https://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(15)00089-X/fulltext

"This rhythm is halted into a purely forward motion when we break into a run." - Charlotte Watts, The De-Stress Effect, 2015

"The boy's voice halted when confronted with words that contained extended code spellings, which confused and confounded him. He forged ahead, grimacing, and bravely attempted to decode each grapheme." - https://www.speechlanguage-resources.com/reading-difficulties.html

"Then his voice halted, jerked, and hiccuped through the dense, consonant-packed lines of Angle of Yaw." - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68800/clever-upstart-declares-youre-all-doomed

"His voice halted as he looked over at Marty Mercer, one of the center’s volunteers, and shared memories of how much Patsy had adored her." - https://www.chisaintjosephhealth.org/blogs/hospital-volunteer-shares-message-of-hope

So, how many more goalposts do I need to kick the ball through before you admit that you were wrong?