Archaic KJV Word
Table
Modern equivalent: tablet
What Was Lost
The covenant weight of the word. The tables of stone were not dining furniture but engraved covenant tablets -- permanent, authoritative, finger-of-God inscribed. Paul's contrast between stone tables and heart tables was about writing surfaces: the law written on dead stone versus written on living flesh. The furniture meaning obscures this.
Closest Survivor in Modern English
table (in 'table of contents' -- a flat display of organized information, preserving the writing-surface meaning)
Peak Usage (1611)
KJV Exodus 31:18 -- 'Two tables of stone, written with the finger of God'; 2 Corinthians 3:3 -- 'Not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart'
Died ~1800 (the 'tablet/flat writing surface' meaning faded)
Narrowed from 'flat surface for writing/tablet/slab' to primarily 'furniture with legs for eating,' turning the tables of the covenant into dining furniture.
What Replaced It
“tablet”
Now conjures iPads rather than stone slabs; the original table/tablet was a permanent, weighty surface for permanent words
“slab”
Crude and geological; table-as-tablet carried the dignity of a prepared writing surface