14:22 Judah did evil in the sight of 1 the Lord. They made him more jealous by their sins than their ancestors had done. 2
9:15 So I turned and went down the mountain while it 11 was blazing with fire; the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. 9:16 When I looked, you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God and had cast for yourselves a metal calf; 12 you had quickly turned aside from the way he 13 had commanded you!
23:1 A man with crushed 18 or severed genitals 19 may not enter the assembly of the Lord. 20 23:2 A person of illegitimate birth 21 may not enter the assembly of the Lord; to the tenth generation no one related to him may do so. 22
33:6 May Reuben live and not die,
and may his people multiply. 23
78:40 How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness,
and insulted him 24 in the desert!
78:56 Yet they challenged and defied 25 the sovereign God, 26
and did not obey 27 his commands. 28
106:29 They made the Lord angry 29 by their actions,
and a plague broke out among them.
8:17 He said to me, “Do you see, son of man? Is it a trivial thing that the house of Judah commits these abominations they are practicing here? For they have filled the land with violence and provoked me to anger still further. Look, they are putting the branch to their nose! 38
8:1 In the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth of the month, 39 as I was sitting in my house with the elders of Judah sitting in front of me, the hand 40 of the sovereign Lord seized me. 41
1 tn Heb “in the eyes of.”
2 tn Heb “and they made him jealous more than all which their fathers had done by their sins which they sinned.”
3 tn Heb “in the mountain.” The demonstrative pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons.
4 sn The very finger of God. This is a double figure of speech (1) in which God is ascribed human features (anthropomorphism) and (2) in which a part stands for the whole (synecdoche). That is, God, as Spirit, has no literal finger nor, if he had, would he write with his finger. Rather, the sense is that God himself – not Moses in any way – was responsible for the composition of the Ten Commandments (cf. Exod 31:18; 32:16; 34:1).
5 tn Heb “according to all the words.”
6 tn Heb “the
7 tc Heb “a casting.” The MT reads מַסֵּכָה (massekhah, “a cast thing”) but some
8 tn Heb “stiff-necked.” See note on the word “stubborn” in 9:6.
9 tn Heb “leave me alone.”
10 tn Heb “from under heaven.”
11 tn Heb “the mountain.” The translation uses a pronoun for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.
12 tn On the phrase “metal calf,” see note on the term “metal image” in v. 12.
13 tn Heb “the
14 tn Heb “the
15 sn Anakites. See note on this term in Deut 1:28.
16 tn Heb “great and tall.” Many English versions understand this to refer to physical size or strength rather than numbers (cf. “strong,” NIV, NCV, NRSV, NLT).
17 tn Heb “slain [one].”
18 tn Heb “bruised by crushing,” which many English versions take to refer to crushed testicles (NAB, NRSV, NLT); TEV “who has been castrated.”
19 tn Heb “cut off with respect to the penis”; KJV, ASV “hath his privy member cut off”; English versions vary in their degree of euphemism here; cf. NAB, NRSV, TEV, NLT “penis”; NASB “male organ”; NCV “sex organ”; CEV “private parts”; NIV “emasculated by crushing or cutting.”
20 sn The Hebrew term translated “assembly” (קָהָל, qahal) does not refer here to the nation as such but to the formal services of the tabernacle or temple. Since emasculated or other sexually abnormal persons were commonly associated with pagan temple personnel, the thrust here may be primarily polemical in intent. One should not read into this anything having to do with the mentally and physically handicapped as fit to participate in the life and ministry of the church.
21 tn Or “a person born of an illegitimate marriage.”
22 tn Heb “enter the assembly of the
23 tn Heb “and [not] may his men be few” (cf. KJV, NASB, NIV).
24 tn Or “caused him pain.”
25 tn Or “tested and rebelled against.”
26 tn Heb “God, the Most High.”
27 tn Or “keep.”
28 tn Heb “his testimonies” (see Ps 25:10).
29 tn Heb “They made angry [him].” The pronominal suffix is omitted here, but does appear in a few medieval Hebrew
30 tn Heb “Will you steal…then say, ‘We are safe’?” Verses 9-10 are one long sentence in the Hebrew text.
31 tn Heb “You go/follow after.” See the translator’s note at 2:5 for an explanation of the idiom involved here.
32 tn Heb “over which my name is called.” For this nuance of this idiom cf. BDB 896 s.v. קָרָא Niph.2.d(4) and see the usage in 2 Sam 12:28.
33 tn Or “‘We are safe!’ – safe, you think, to go on doing all those hateful things.” Verses 9-10 are all one long sentence in the Hebrew text. It has been broken up for English stylistic reasons. Somewhat literally it reads “Will you steal…then come and stand…and say, ‘We are safe’ so as to/in order to do…” The Hebrew of v. 9 has a series of infinitives which emphasize the bare action of the verb without the idea of time or agent. The effect is to place a kind of staccato like emphasis on the multitude of their sins all of which are violations of one of the Ten Commandments. The final clause in v. 8 expresses purpose or result (probably result) through another infinitive. This long sentence is introduced by a marker (ה interrogative in Hebrew) introducing a rhetorical question in which God expresses his incredulity that they could do these sins, come into the temple and claim the safety of his protection, and then go right back out and commit the same sins. J. Bright (Jeremiah [AB], 52) catches the force nicely: “What? You think you can steal, murder…and then come and stand…and say, ‘We are safe…’ just so that you can go right on…”
34 tn The Hebrew term is normally used as an architectural term in describing the pattern of the tabernacle or temple or a representation of it (see Exod 25:8; 1 Chr 28:11).
35 tn Or “spirit.” See note on “wind” in 2:2.
36 map For the location of Jerusalem see Map5-B1; Map6-F3; Map7-E2; Map8-F2; Map10-B3; JP1-F4; JP2-F4; JP3-F4; JP4-F4.
37 tn Or “image.”
38 tn It is not clear what the practice of “holding a branch to the nose” indicates. A possible parallel is the Syrian relief of a king holding a flower to his nose as he worships the stars (ANEP 281). See L. C. Allen, Ezekiel (WBC), 1:145-46. The LXX glosses the expression as “Behold, they are like mockers.”
39 tc The LXX reads “In the sixth year, in the fifth month, on the fifth of the month.”
40 tn Or “power.”
41 tn Heb “fell upon me there,” that is, God’s influence came over him.
42 tc Some of the better representatives of the Alexandrian and Western texts have a passive verb here instead of the active ἀποκατήλλαξεν (apokathllaxen, “he has reconciled”): ἀποκατηλλάγητε (apokathllaghte) in (Ì46) B, ἀποκατήλλακται [sic] (apokathllaktai) in 33, and ἀποκαταλλαγέντες (apokatallagente") in D* F G. Yet the active verb is strongly supported by א A C D2 Ψ 048 075 [0278] 1739 1881 Ï lat sy. Internally, the passive creates an anacoluthon in that it looks back to the accusative ὑμᾶς (Juma", “you”) of v. 21 and leaves the following παραστῆσαι (parasthsai) dangling (“you were reconciled…to present you”). The passive reading is certainly the harder reading. As such, it may well explain the rise of the other readings. At the same time, it is possible that the passive was produced by scribes who wanted some symmetry between the ποτε (pote, “at one time”) of v. 21 and the νυνὶ δέ (nuni de, “but now”) of v. 22: Since a passive periphrastic participle is used in v. 21, there may have a temptation to produce a corresponding passive form in v. 22, handling the ὑμᾶς of v. 21 by way of constructio ad sensum. Since παραστῆσαι occurs ten words later, it may not have been considered in this scribal modification. Further, the Western reading (ἀποκαταλλαγέντες) hardly seems to have arisen from ἀποκατηλλάγητε (contra TCGNT 555). As difficult as this decision is, the preferred reading is the active form because it is superior externally and seems to explain the rise of all forms of the passive readings.