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Judge the diction against the targetted audience. It is not he kind of Bible you take to church. It is big, thick, expensive, and a third or more of the book is commentary. Is all of this a clue to what the book is about? It is a translation for a pretty educated crowd, the kind that would be intrigued with "welter" and willing to look it up if they have to.
As for whether all the words in narrative parts of the Bible are familiar words, we have no way of judging that. ;-)
We *have* a way of judging whether _bohu_ is unfamiliar. It has an elusive etymology. It only appear three times in the Bible, always in conjunction with the more familiar word tohu, and twice as a veritable allusions to the first in Gen. 1:2. It rhymes with _tohu_. Alter's suggestion that _bohu_ may be a "nonce word coined to rhyme with [_tohu_]" seems plausible. I don't say *probable*; plausible.Most languages have such doublets, often written with hyphens, e.g. English "helter-skelter", where one element or both is not an independent word. But that doesn't in fact affect the issue, which becomes whether the particular doublet was well understood.
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