You have probably heard it. The word translated sorceries in the book of Revelation, someone tells you, is the word we get our English word pharmacy from. And then comes the conclusion, delivered as though the first sentence had proved it: Revelation is condemning the pharmaceutical industry. The drug companies are the sorcery of the last days. I have heard it preached, and it circulates widely enough that more than one ministry has published an answer to it. It lands with real force on a believer who has never been shown how the argument is built.

The first sentence is true. The conclusion does not follow from it, and it is not what the passage says.

I want to do more here than answer one bad argument, because the argument is not really the problem. The method is the problem, and once you have seen it you will find it everywhere — in books, in sermons, in study Bibles, and in men who are otherwise careful and sound. It is a way of reaching behind your English Bible to overturn what it plainly says, using a fact about the history of words that cannot possibly bear the weight being put on it. Learn the shape of it and you will never be caught by it again.

The passage charges deception, not commerce

Start where the argument claims its strongest ground, and read the whole verse. Here it is with one word held back:

"And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations..." (Revelation 18:23 KJV)

Read that way, the sentence seems to run in a straight line from merchants to sorceries, and a commercial reading almost forms itself. Great men of the earth. Merchants. Sorceries. Now put the word back:

"...for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived." (Revelation 18:23 KJV)

Deceived. That is the charge, and it is the whole charge. Not poisoned, not drugged, not sold to — deceived. Whatever these sorceries are, the indictment against them is that they told the nations a lie and the nations believed it. Two separate accusations stand in that verse, and the argument depends on quietly fusing them into one.

And the chapter keeps them apart itself. Ten verses earlier it inventories Babylon's merchandise at length — gold, silver, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, ivory, brass, iron, marble, and then "cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat" (Revelation 18:13), and more after that. Ointments are in that list. Sorceries are not. If Babylon's sorceries had been her merchandise, the inventory lay open and they were not written into it.

The company a word keeps tells you what it is

Scripture rarely leaves a word standing alone. It sets it among its fellows, and the fellows tell you what sort of thing you are looking at. Watch where this one is placed every time it appears.

"Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts." (Revelation 9:21 KJV)

Murders. Fornication. Thefts. Every neighbour in that list is a moral act done by a person who will answer for it. Not one of them is a trade, a profession, or an industry. And again:

"But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." (Revelation 21:8 KJV)

The fearful, the unbelieving, the abominable, idolaters, liars. Paul puts it in exactly the same kind of company:

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like." (Galatians 5:19–21 KJV)

Set beside idolatry twice over — and in Revelation 9 the idols stand in the verse immediately before, where men repent not of worshipping devils and idols of gold (Revelation 9:20). Three lists, and in every one the fellows are false worship and sins of the heart and hand. Not one of them names a trade.

A merchant does stand in the same sentence as the word once, and only once in all of Scripture — in Revelation 18:23, the very verse the whole argument is built on. But he stands in his own clause, under his own charge, and we have already seen what happens when the two are pressed together. Babylon is indicted for her merchants and she is indicted for her sorceries. That verse brings two counts, not one compound count, and the argument needs them fused to work.

A reader with nothing but an English Bible can see all of that in a couple of minutes, and it is worth more than any word history.

There is one more verse a careful objector will reach for, and it deserves a straight answer. Nahum describes Nineveh as "the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts" (Nahum 3:4 KJV). Selling and witchcraft in the same breath — surely that is commerce at last. Read it once more. She does not sell witchcraft. She sells nations by means of it. The witchcraft is how she seduces and betrays them, which is the identical charge laid against Babylon: a harlot city whose sorceries deceived the nations. The strongest verse for the commercial reading turns out to say exactly what this article says.

Your Bible uses that word elsewhere, and says plainly what it means

Here is the part that ought to settle the matter, and it needs no outside help at all.

Sorceries is not a word your Bible saves up for Revelation. It stands in Isaiah as well, spoken against Babylon — and there the Lord says outright what Babylon's sorceries were. You can turn to it and read it in English.

"But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood: they shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments." (Isaiah 47:9 KJV)

That is the charge laid against her. Now hear the Lord name the thing itself:

"Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee." (Isaiah 47:13 KJV)

Astrologers. Stargazers. Monthly prognosticators. Men consulted for counsel and for a reading of what was coming. There is no potion anywhere in the chapter. No drug, no draught, no medicine, no apothecary. Babylon's sorceries were her going to a power that was not God to learn what she could not otherwise know — and it is the same in Egypt, where "Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers" (Exodus 7:11) to match what God had done through Moses.

There is money in that chapter too, and it is worth facing rather than stepping around. Babylon laboured in her sorceries "from thy youth; if so be thou shalt be able to profit" (Isaiah 47:12), and the Lord calls the men she dealt with "thy merchants" (Isaiah 47:15) — who take what she paid, wander off each to his own quarter, and not one of them can save her. So a trade there certainly was. But what was bought and sold was counsel from the stars, and the chapter names it as the thing that failed her. The commerce is the trade built around the sorcery; it is never the sorcery itself.

Revelation and Isaiah, one English word between them, and the older passage shows you what it names. That is your Bible teaching you its own vocabulary, and you never had to leave the page to learn it.

Some who press the pharmacy argument try to build a bridge from Revelation back to Isaiah by way of an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, supposed to be older than Christ and to have used the same word in both places. That bridge will not bear the weight, for reasons that have nothing to do with sorcery and everything to do with where that Greek text actually came from; I have taken it up in Preserved, Not Re-Inspired: Why We Hold the King James. But notice that you never needed the bridge. The two passages are already joined in the English you are holding.

The argument is running the word backwards through time

Now name the method plainly, because this is the part worth keeping.

It works in three steps. First, a word in your English Bible is traced back to the word it was translated from. Second, that older word is found to be the ancestor of some modern English word. Third — and this is where it goes wrong — the modern word's meaning is carried back and read into the ancient verse.

Watch the direction of travel. The verse was written first. The English word came into being many centuries later, out of a long line of borrowings through Latin and French, picking up and shedding senses the whole way. What a word's distant descendants came to mean, in another language, in another age, cannot tell you what the Holy Ghost meant when He moved a man to write. The influence runs one way through time, and the argument requires it to run the other.

There is a second sleight of hand inside it. That old word did not mean one thing; it covered a whole trade. The man who ground the roots might produce a healing draught, a poison, a dye for cloth, or something meant to work by an incantation — and the same word covered all of it, because the ancient world did not separate medicine from magic the way we do. The argument reaches into that spread, picks out the one item that suits its purpose, and announces that this is what the word literally means. It is not a definition. It is a selection, presented as a definition.

The same move, where the anachronism is impossible to miss

Take a second example, because when the anachronism is loud enough anyone can hear it.

Paul writes that the gospel "is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth" (Romans 1:16), and that to us which are saved the preaching of the cross "is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18). The word behind power is traced back, and it turns out to be the ancestor of our word dynamite. From there the sermon writes itself: the power of God is explosive power, blasting power, dynamite power. You have almost certainly heard it. It is a favourite.

Dynamite was invented in 1867. Paul had been dead for roughly eighteen centuries. Whatever he meant by the power of God, he did not mean nitroglycerin packed into a paper tube, and no amount of word history can put it there.

Now notice something important, because there are two different things being done and only one of them is an error. To remark that our word dynamite descends from the word behind that verse is a true statement about the history of English. It is harmless, and it is even mildly interesting. The error arrives one sentence later, when the modern word's sense is carried back and preached as the meaning of the text. That is the whole distance between a fact and a fault, and it is one sentence wide. Careful men cross it without noticing — I have read it in authors I respect and have learned much from, men whose work on right division I would put in anyone's hands. This is not a fault of bad teachers only. It is a fault so easy that good ones make it, which is exactly why it is worth naming.

Four questions that will expose it every time

You do not need Greek to test one of these arguments. You need four questions, and a Bible.

Did the thing being condemned exist when the verse was written? This is the fastest and the most decisive. Dynamite did not exist in Paul's day. Neither did the pharmaceutical corporation. A verse cannot be about a thing that would not exist for eighteen hundred years.

Is the whole case resting on the words literally means? That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work in these arguments, and it is nearly always covering a selection — one sense lifted out of several the word carried at once, then presented as though it were the only one.

Will the verse's own neighbours support the conclusion? Look at the list the word sits in, at the sentence around it, at the paragraph. In every sorcery passage we have examined, the word's fellows are moral acts and false worship. Commerce does turn up in the neighbourhood — a merchant in Revelation, a selling in Nahum, merchants in Isaiah — and each time it is attached to the sorcery, worked by it or sold around it, and never the sorcery itself. Neither the fellows nor the commerce will carry an industry, and the argument has to walk past both to arrive.

Could this argument be made at all from an English Bible? This is the last of the four and the one that goes deepest. If it could not — if it exists only by going behind the text to a word the hearer cannot read and cannot check — then he is not being taught the Scripture. He is being asked to trust the man at the front. That is a poor exchange, and the man asking for it usually has no original in his hand either. Nobody does. Not one original page of Scripture exists anywhere on earth — which is the whole burden of Preserved, Not Re-Inspired.

The work was already done, and by men equipped to do it

Let me be careful to say what this article is not.

This is not a complaint against studying the original tongues, and it is not a suggestion that the words behind our English do not matter. They matter enormously. Weighing those words is precisely what the translators did. They were men of extraordinary learning, they worked together rather than alone, they were accountable to one another, and they stood on the labour of the English translators before them — and the result of all of it is the book on your desk. When they came to these passages they weighed everything the word could carry, and they wrote sorceries. They wrote witchcraft. They did not write pharmacy, and they did not write drugs.

That is a verdict from men who had the whole range in front of them, and it deserves more respect than a phrase pulled out of a lexicon by someone who has not.

Notice also what the translators refused to do. They did not leave the word untranslated and sitting on the page in its foreign dress, the way modern versions so often leave the words for hell standing in the original so that the English reader is told nothing and warned less. A word left untranslated teaches the English reader nothing. It only draws a curtain where plain English would have made him feel the thing. Our translators put it into English on purpose, and the English they chose is the answer to the question the argument pretends to be asking.

God defined the term Himself, and He did it in English you can read

Here is what makes the whole appeal unnecessary. You were never left to guess what sorcery is. God defined it, plainly, in a list you can turn to:

"There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD." (Deuteronomy 18:10–12 KJV)

There is the definition, and there is not a pharmacy in it. Divination. Observing times. Enchantment. Consulting familiar spirits. Calling up the dead. Every item on that list is a way of reaching for knowledge or power from a source that is not God — and that is what the word means, because that is what God said it covers.

Read your Bible for a while and it will teach you its own vocabulary this way. The hard word gets opened by the company it keeps, by the list it stands in, by the plainer word lying beside it, and by the passage that shows the thing being done. The Book is the best teacher of its own terms. That is why the answer to a word you do not know is to keep reading until Scripture explains it, not to reach past Scripture for a dictionary that was never inspired.

And what Scripture describes, everywhere it speaks of sorcery, is one settled thing: spiritual power sought, or claimed, outside of what God has given. That is Simon in Samaria, who "used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one" (Acts 8:9). That is Babylon, wearied in the multitude of her counsels (Isaiah 47:13). It is the flesh reaching for a supernatural result on its own terms, without submission and without the word of God. Which is why rebellion could be measured against it: "For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft" (1 Samuel 15:23).

Most of these passages belong to prophecy — one of them is written to you

Now rightly divide it, because this is where the popular argument goes wrong a second time, and hardly anyone notices.

Look at where these passages sit. Every one of the Revelation passages is prophetic — Revelation 9:21, Revelation 18:23, Revelation 21:8, Revelation 22:15. They belong to the tribulation, to the judgment of Babylon, and to the great white throne. They describe the sin of a world under wrath after the Body of Christ is gone. That is the whole basis of the popular argument, and it is being made from mail that was never addressed to us.

One passage is Pauline, and that is the one that is yours. It sits in the works of the flesh, written to believers in this present dispensation of grace:

"Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies." (Galatians 5:20 KJV)

And look at what Paul does with it. He does not tell the Body of Christ to campaign against an industry. He does not tell us to identify sorcery out in the world and denounce it. He names it as a work of the flesh — something my own flesh will produce if I walk in it — and he gives the remedy in the same breath: "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh" (Galatians 5:16), and "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit" (Galatians 5:25).

That lands closer to home than the popular reading ever does, and it is a good deal less comfortable. The argument about the drug companies puts the sin safely outside, in somebody else's boardroom. Paul puts it in my flesh. And it reaches inside the professing church every time a man tries to work a spiritual result by a technique, a formula, or a claimed power that God never gave him — pressing for a supernatural outcome on his own terms rather than standing on what God has said.

The verse before the one everybody quotes

Every believer in right division knows Paul's charge to Timothy: "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). Fewer notice the verse standing immediately before it.

"Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers." (2 Timothy 2:14 KJV)

Strive not about words to no profit. That is the sentence that opens the paragraph on rightly dividing, and it is a warning about exactly this. Note what Paul says the cost is. Not that the striving is merely useless — that it works to the subverting of the hearers. It turns them over. A congregation trained to receive its doctrine from word origins has been taught, without anyone saying it aloud, that the Book in their lap is not enough, and that the real meaning lies somewhere behind it, in the keeping of whoever has the reference works. That is a subversion, however sincerely it is done.

So hold the sound words instead. "Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me" (2 Timothy 1:13). Not the form of sound origins. The words.

What to do the next time you hear it

The next time a man tells you that a word in your Bible is where we get some modern English word from, and that the verse therefore means what the modern word means, do three things.

Let him finish, and grant him the derivation if it is true — it usually is, and it is not the problem. Then put the four questions to him. Did the thing he is condemning exist when the verse was written? Is the whole case resting on literally means? Will the verse's own neighbours carry his conclusion — read the list aloud and ask him to show it to you in them? And could he have arrived at this at all from an English Bible? If he is still standing after those, ask him what the translators wrote, and why the word they chose is not good enough.

If the argument survives all four questions, it was never resting on the word history in the first place, and you can weigh it on its merits. It almost never survives. And when it does not, you have not lost anything at all — you still have the verse, in English, saying what it always said.

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ" (Colossians 2:8). A word study is not philosophy, but it can be made to do the same work: to move a believer off the plain sense of what God said and onto the authority of a man who claims to know better. Your Bible is not a locked box that requires a specialist to open. God gave you His words, He kept them, and He put them in a tongue you can read. Read them. Let the Book teach you its own vocabulary. And when someone offers to tell you what your verse really means, ask him to show it to you on the page.

© 2026 Edward R. Cross