"Convenient" Is Not a False Friend in the KJV

Out of all of Mark Ward’s so-called “false friends” that I’ve studied so far, the word convenient has come the closest to being an actual “false friend,” yet Ward has devoted remarkably little effort to studying and discussing this word. I’ve found Ward’s scholarship to be sloppy in general, but the section of his book devoted to the word convenient is even worse. If Ward actually wanted to prove his case with logic and reason, this term would be one of his prime examples, but I suspect that it lacks the emotional appeal to fit within his normal modus operandi. I’m going to begin by correcting Ward’s shoddy scholarship and presenting the case that he should have made before arguing against that case and demonstrating that convenient is not a “false friend” after all.

The Greek and Hebrew Terms
 
The word convenient only occurs nine times in the KJV. In five of those cases, it means “commodious or favorable to one’s comfort.” The other four are translations of one Hebrew word and two related Greek words. The Hebrew term is חֹק (khoke), and the two Greek terms are ἀνήκω (anēkō) and καθήκω (kathēkō). The four verses where these terms are translated as convenient are Proverbs 30:8, Romans 1:28, Ephesians 5:4, and Philemon 1:8, and there’s really no doubt that the terms translated as “convenient” in these passages essentially mean “fitting, suitable, or measuring up.”
 
I’m not going to spend any more time on the Greek and Hebrew terms for the simple reason that Ward has not once mentioned them in any of his treatments of the word convenient. This is the first example of Ward’s sloppy scholarship regarding what he lists as “False Friend 4” in his book. Ward asserts that the KJV translators used the term convenient to mean “fitting, suitable, or measuring up,” but he never once explained why they intended that meaning for the term in the first place. This part of his assertion is correct, but it’s poorly presented.
 
The “Obsolete” Definition
 
Ward claimed that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists an obsolete definition for convenient that fits the intent of the KJV translators, and he is correct in that claim. The OED does in fact list a definition for convenient that fits the intent of the translators, and that definition is labeled as obsolete. But then Ward quoted the wrong definition! Ward quoted definition 4a, which is “suitable, appropriate; to or for a purpose.” The definition he should have referenced for his argument is definition 5, “morally or ethically suitable or becoming; proper.”
 
Ward introduced his erroneous quotation by saying, “Look at the definition and then look at the citations (examples from real-life usage) that it gives.” He then quoted definition 4a and all of the examples listed under it in the OED. If Ward had bothered to read definition 5 in the same dictionary, he would have seen this list of examples:

The OED lists six examples under this definition, and the fourth example is: “1611 Bible Eph. v. 4 Neither filthinesse, nor foolish talking, nor iesting, which are not conuenient.” All Ward had to do to find the correct definition was follow his own advice and read the citations! Why he didn’t do this is beyond my comprehension. Maybe he didn’t recognize the reference because he got tripped up by the Roman numeral and the older spelling. I don’t know the reason, but this is yet another demonstration of the poor quality of Ward’s scholarship.
 
[Note: I am using the numbering from the second edition of the OED because that is the edition which was available to Ward at the time that his book was written. The entry for convenient in the third edition is essentially the same as in the second except that the various senses are listed in a different order.]
 
The “Modern” Definition
 
Ward correctly identified the sense of convenient that the OED lists as the current sense. This was relatively easy to do since the OED literally wrote “the current sense” next to this definition. According to the OED, the current definition of the word convenient is: “Personally suitable or well-adapted to one’s easy action or performance of functions; favourable to one’s comfort, easy condition, or the saving of trouble; commodious.” That is what the word convenient means most of the time that it is used today.
 
The thing that caught my attention in Ward’s treatment of this sense of the word was his claim that “the KJV translators used [convenient] in another sense available to them—one that is no longer available to us, because no one ever uses it. That’s what makes that sense archaic.” I’ve pointed out before that Ward seems to be uniquely ignorant of what the various labels in the dictionary actually mean. He frequently uses the wrong label and switches back and forth between the labels “rare,” “archaic,” and “obsolete” as if they are all synonymous. We can see another example of Ward’s ignorance here. The OED does not use the archaic label for any of its definitions of convenient. The sense that Ward says is an archaic sense is actually labeled as “obsolete” in the OED.
 
This is an important distinction. According to the Oxford Languages website, the archaic label is given to words that are still used today in “old-fashioned or historical contexts,” and according to the information page of the OED, the obsolete label is used for words, definitions, or senses that are “no longer in use in the English language.” In the OED, the obsolete label has a greater sense of finality than the archaic label. It “usually means that no evidence for the term can be found in modern English.” It is important to maintain a distinction between these labels, and Ward’s inability to do so is further proof of the crudeness of his scholarship.
 
The Speculative Argument
 
When describing the use of the word convenient in Ephesians 5:4, Ward made the claim that “you and I have never in our lives used this word convenient to mean what the KJV translators used it to mean in Ephesians 5:4.” That’s a very bold statement, and I suspect that Ward felt comfortable making it because he saw all the obsolete labels in the OED entry for convenient. Unfortunately for Ward, the evidence argues against both the OED and his claim.
 
The entry for convenient in the second edition of the OED is identical to the entry in the first edition, which was compiled sometime prior to its initial publication in 1933. At that time, the editors of the dictionary were obviously convinced that the alternate senses for convenient were all obsolete. The third edition is currently in production, and the entry for convenient was updated sometime after the date of its latest citation, July 7, 2022. The editors in 2022 probably assumed that the senses which were declared to be obsolete in 1933 couldn’t be anything but obsolete now, nearly one hundred years later. It is not likely that the current editors thought to verify whether the obsolete labels of the first edition were still accurate today.
 
If the OED editors had taken the time to test the accuracy of the labels, they would have found that convenient is often used in its generic sense of “suitable, fitting, or proper.” The most common use of convenient in this sense is found in the legal field. Variations of the phrase necessary and convenient can be found throughout most of the legal codes in America. For example, the Code of Alabama uses the phrase necessary and convenient twenty-six times and the phrase necessary or convenient 262 times.

A search of the codes of California will return more than six hundred uses of these two phrases.

These laws are not about doing things that are favorable to one’s comfort. They are about doing things that are suitable, fitting, or proper.
 
When the State of Alabama says that the Agricultural Authority has the power “to enter into contracts . . . and to take other actions as may be necessary or convenient to accomplish any purpose for which an authority is organized,” they are saying that the Agricultural Authority has the power to enter into contracts that are suitable, fitting, and proper for accomplishing its purpose. They are not saying that the Agricultural Authority has the power to enter into contracts that are favorable to the personal comfort of its board of directors.
 
When the State of California says that a city may “acquire, by condemnation, purchase, gift, lease, or any other means, property necessary or convenient for use as parking places,” they are saying that their cities have the power to purchase property that is suitable, fitting, or proper for use as parking places. They are not saying that their cities may acquire property just to create parking places that are favorable to the personal comfort of city officials.
 
Of course, all of these laws about the power to do things necessary and convenient have produced a large number of court cases discussing the limits of necessity and convenience which are implicit in those laws. Google Scholar currently catalogues 684 cases since 1980 which reference the phrase necessary and convenient as well as 1,760 cases which reference the phrase necessary or convenient. That’s an average of fifty-four cases per year, more than one case every week, for the past forty-five years, and that’s just the cases that have advanced to state or federal courts. There’s no way to count how many more cases were decided in lower courts.
 
This sense of convenient is used so abundantly in court cases and legal codes that many people outside the legal field are aware of it as well. Businesses and corporations are often obligated to comply with laws using the word convenient in this manner, and these laws are often mentioned in books written for businessmen. For example, the 2005 popular-level book How to Form a Limited Liability Company in Florida references the Florida law which grants LLCs the power to “make contracts of guaranty and suretyship which are necessary or convenient to the conduct, promotion, or attainment of the business of a corporation.” And the 2000 book How to Form a Corporation in Massachusetts references laws in that state with identical language.
 
But it’s not just businessmen who have an interest in understanding this sense of convenient. The frequent use of this term in legal documents has generated an awareness of it among a broad range of people. The word convenient is used to mean “suitable, fitting, or proper” in John F. Halbleib’s 2005 book on the philanthropic efforts in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Hershey: Ideal Community for Orphans. Richard T. Cupitt’s 2000 book Reluctant Champions compared the policies of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Bush, and Clinton, and it references President Wilson’s “List of Contraband of War” which included “all kinds of arms, guns, ammunition, explosives, and . . . articles necessary or convenient for their use.” The word convenient is used in this sense in John Hausdoerffer’s 2009 book Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature, and Gary Lawson and his co-authors used the word in this sense in their 2010 book The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause. In 1998, the University of Washington even produced, performed, filmed, and broadcast on public television a play entitled All Powers Necessary and Convenient.
 
Plus, in just the past ten years in the U.S., the phrase necessary and convenient has appeared in articles from Yahoo News, The New York Daily News, and the Chicago Daily Herald while the phrase necessary or convenient has made appearances in Yahoo Finance, New York Magazine, Richmond.com, MSN, The Boston Globe, Nasdaq.com, The Daily Herald, the Voice of San Diego, and NBC.
 
Ward claimed that “you and I have never in our lives used this word convenient to mean what the KJV translators used it to mean in Ephesians 5:4.” But there are more than a million practicing attorneys in the U.S., and all of them are intimately familiar with the phrases necessary and convenient and necessary or convenient. Add to that the large number of people familiar with these phrases from either complying with them or reading the various literary works or news articles that mention these phrases, and we can only conclude that there are currently millions of people in America alone who have no problem at all realizing that the word convenient in Ephesians 5:4 could mean “suitable, fitting, or proper.”

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