In the King James version of the Bible there is a verse like this:
The Lord is my strength, and my fortress, and my song. And He is become my salvation.
Is it still feasible to use "is become" instead of "has become" and what is the semantic difference?
Best Answer
The use of "is become" here relates to verbs of motion/transition; verbs of motion would take be while other verbs would take have. There is no such grammatical distinction in English perfect forms anymore.
English began with this distinction, as did sibling languages like German (as Cindi pointed out originally in a now-deleted answer).
Here is what happened after that. This is an excerpt from the OED's discussion of auxiliary have:
This is talking about English retaining the auxiliary be for motion verbs, like present-day German. Originally, the verb "to be" also used be as an auxiliary for the perfect, e.g. "it is been cold", but changed to have in early Middle English. (German still uses "ist gewesen", or "is been", today.) After this change, the other motion verbs still retained the be-auxiliary for perfect.
In Modern English, the motion distinction completely faded out, and be was replaced with have across the board, except in a very specific case. The OED describes this case:
Keep in mind that become is not intransitive, so "is become" doesn't work anymore, with any meaning, in present-day English (— except, of course, in poetic use).