Deuteronomy 11:12

11:12 a land the Lord your God looks after. ¹  He is constantly attentive to it ²  from the beginning to the end of the year. ³ 

Deuteronomy 11:2

11:2 Bear in mind today that I am not speaking ⁴  to your children who have not personally experienced the judgments ⁵  of the Lord your God, which revealed ⁶  his greatness, strength, and power. ⁷ 

Deuteronomy 6:1

Exhortation to Keep the Covenant Principles

6:1 Now these are the commandments, ⁸  statutes, and ordinances that the Lord your God instructed me to teach you so that you may carry them out in the land where you are headed ⁹ 

Deuteronomy 7:15-16

7:15 The Lord will protect you from all sickness, and you will not experience any of the terrible diseases that you knew in Egypt; instead he will inflict them on all those who hate you.

Exhortation to Destroy Canaanite Paganism

7:16 You must destroy ¹⁰  all the people whom the Lord your God is about to deliver over to you; you must not pity them or worship ¹¹  their gods, for that will be a snare to you.

Psalms 132:13-14

132:13 Certainly ¹²  the Lord has chosen Zion;

he decided to make it his home. ¹³ 

132:14 He said, ¹⁴  “This will be my resting place forever;

I will live here, for I have chosen it. ¹⁵ 

The Song of Songs 4:9-10

4:9 You have stolen my heart, ¹⁶  my sister, ¹⁷  my bride!

You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, ¹⁸ 

with one jewel of your necklace.

4:10 How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!

How much better is your love than wine;

the fragrance of your perfume is better than any spice!

Jeremiah 15:1

15:1 Then the Lord said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me pleading for ¹⁹  these people, I would not feel pity for them! ²⁰  Get them away from me! Tell them to go away! ²¹ 

[11:12]  ¹ tn Heb “seeks.” The statement reflects the ancient belief that God (Baal in Canaanite thinking) directly controlled storms and rainfall.

[11:12]  ² tn Heb “the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it” (so NIV); NASB, NRSV “always on it.”

[11:12]  ³ sn From the beginning to the end of the year. This refers to the agricultural year that was marked by the onset of the heavy rains, thus the autumn. See note on the phrase “the former and the latter rains” in v. 14.

[11:2]  ⁴ tn Heb “that not.” The words “I am speaking” have been supplied in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[11:2]  ⁵ tn Heb “who have not known and who have not seen the discipline of the Lord.” The collocation of the verbs “know” and “see” indicates that personal experience (knowing by seeing) is in view. The term translated “discipline” (KJV, ASV “chastisement”) may also be rendered “instruction,” but vv. 2b-6 indicate that the referent of the term is the various acts of divine judgment the Israelites had witnessed.

[11:2]  ⁶ tn The words “which revealed” have been supplied in the translation to show the logical relationship between the terms that follow and the divine judgments. In the Hebrew text the former are in apposition to the latter.

[11:2]  ⁷ tn Heb “his strong hand and his stretched-out arm.”

[6:1]  ⁸ tn Heb “commandment.” The word מִצְוָה (mitsvah) again is in the singular, serving as a comprehensive term for the whole stipulation section of the book. See note on the word “commandments” in 5:31.

[6:1]  ⁹ tn Heb “where you are going over to possess it” (so NASB); NRSV “that you are about to cross into and occupy.”

[7:16]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “devour” (so NRSV); KJV, NAB, NASB “consume.” The verbal form (a perfect with vav consecutive) is understood here as having an imperatival or obligatory nuance (cf. the instructions and commands that follow). Another option is to take the statement as a continuation of the preceding conditional promises and translate “and you will destroy.”

[7:16]  ¹¹ tn Or “serve” (so KJV, NIV, NRSV).

[132:13]  ¹² tn Or “for.”

[132:13]  ¹³ tn Heb “he desired it for his dwelling place.”

[132:14]  ¹⁴ tn The words “he said” are added in the translation to clarify that what follows are the Lord’s words.

[132:14]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “for I desired it.”

[4:9]  ¹⁶ tn The Piel denominative verb לבב is derived from the noun לֵבָב (levav, “heart”), and occurs only here. Its meaning is debated: (1) metonymical sense: “you have encouraged me,” that is, given me heart (BDB 525 s.v. לֵב; AV, RSV); (2) intensive sense: “you have made my heart beat faster” (KBL 471 s.v. I לבב); and (3) privative sense: “you have ravished my heart” or “you have stolen my heart” (HALOT 515 s.v. I לבב; GKC 141-42 §52.h) (NIV). While the Niphal stem has a metonymical nuance (cause for effect): to get heart, that is, to get understanding (Job 11:12), the Piel stem may have a privative nuance: to take away heart, that is, to take away the senses. Her beauty was so overwhelming that it robbed him of his senses (e.g., Hos 4:11). This is paralleled by a modern Palestinian love song: “She stood opposite me and deprived me of reason (literally, “took my heart”), your dark eyes slew me while I was singing, your eyebrows drove shame from me…the darkness of your eyes have slain me; O one clad in purple clothes, it is worthwhile falling in love with you, for your eyes are black and sparkle, and have slain me indeed.” Less likely is the proposal of Waldeman who relates this to Akkadian lababu (“to rage, be aroused to fury”), suggesting that Song 4:9 means “to become passionately aroused” or “to be aroused sexually.” See S. H. Stephan, “Modern Palestinian Parallels to the Song of Songs,” JPOS 2 (1922): 13; R. Gordis, Song of Songs and Lamentations, 85-86; N. M. Waldman, “A Note on Canticles 4:9,” JBL 89 (1970): 215-17; H. W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 40-58.

[4:9]  ¹⁷ sn It is clear from Song 8:1 that the young man and his bride were not physical brother and sister, yet he addresses his bride as אֲחֹתִי (’akhoti, “my sister”) several times (4:9, 10, 12; 5:1). This probably reflects any one of several ancient Near Eastern customs: (1) The appellatives “my sister” and “my brother” were both commonly used in ancient Near Eastern love literature as figurative descriptions of two lovers. For instance, in a Ugaritic poem when Anat tried to seduce Aqhat, she says, “Hear, O hero Aqhat, you are my brother and I your sister” (Aqhat 18 i. 24). In the OT Apocrypha husband and wife are referred to several times as “brother” and “sister” (Add Esth 15:9; Tob 5:20; 7:16). This “sister-wife” motif might be behind Paul’s perplexing statement about a “sister-wife” (1 Cor 9:5). (2) In several Mesopotamian societies husbands actually could legally adopt their wives for a variety of reasons. For instance, in Hurrian society husbands in the upper classes sometimes adopted their wives as “sisters” in order to form the strongest of all possible marriage bonds; a man could divorce his wife but he could not divorce his “sister” because she was “family.” At Nuzi a husband could adopt his wife to give her a higher status in society. See M. Held, “A Faithful Lover in Old Babylonian Dialogue,” JCS 15 (1961): 1-26 and S. N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite, 103-5; T. Jacobsen, “The Sister’s Message,” JANESCU 5 (1973): 199-212; E. A. Speiser, “The Wife-Sister Motif in the Patriarchal Narratives,” Oriental and Biblical Studies, 15- 28; G. R. Driver, Canaanite Myths and Legends, 111.

[4:9]  ¹⁸ tn Alternately, “eye-stone [of your necklace].” The term עִינַיִךְ (’inayikh, “your eyes”) probably refers to her physical eyes (e.g., 4:1). However, in Sumero-Akkadian literature the term “eye” sometimes refers to the eye-stone of a necklace. Agate-stones were cut so that white stripes appeared around the black or brown core to look like the pupil on the eye. M. H. Pope (Song of Songs [AB], 482-83) suggests that the parallelism between the A and B lines suggests the following: “with one of your eye-stones” and “with one jewel of your necklace.” See W. G. Lambert, “An Eye Stone of Esarhaddon’s Queen and Other Similar Gems,” RA 63 (1969): 65-71.

[15:1]  ¹⁹ tn The words “pleading for” have been supplied in the translation to explain the idiom (a metonymy). For parallel usage see BDB 763 s.v. עָמַד Qal.1.a and compare usage in Gen 19:27, Deut 4:10.

[15:1]  ²⁰ tn Heb “my soul would not be toward them.” For the usage of “soul” presupposed here see BDB 660 s.v. נֶפֶשׁ 6 in the light of the complaints and petitions in Jeremiah’s prayer in 14:19, 21.

[15:1]  ²¹ tn Heb “Send them away from my presence and let them go away.”