I appreciate your response. You are right that we don’t have the original manuscript. I use the term to describe, generally, the oldest manuscripts we have but that is technically an inaccurate term. I target these at the general reader so sometimes I sacrifice specificity for getting the idea out there, but I should think carefully about when that may be more effective.

On your second point, translators ABSOLUTELY insert their bias, and in fact this is unavoidable. I tried to illustrate this in the example from Song of Songs but maybe I wasn’t clear enough. This is why we have to compare translations, and for the Old Testament, we should compare them to work by Jewish translators.