2 Chronicles 14:4

14:4 He ordered Judah to seek the Lord God of their ancestors ¹  and to observe his law and commands. ² 

2 Chronicles 30:12

30:12 In Judah God moved the people to unite and carry out the edict the king and the officers had issued at the Lord’s command. ³ 

2 Chronicles 33:16

33:16 He erected the altar of the Lord and offered on it peace offerings and thank offerings. He told the people of ⁴  Judah to serve the Lord God of Israel.

Genesis 18:19

18:19 I have chosen him ⁵  so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep ⁶  the way of the Lord by doing ⁷  what is right and just. Then the Lord will give ⁸  to Abraham what he promised ⁹  him.”

Ecclesiastes 8:2

8:2 Obey the king’s command, ¹⁰ 

because you took ¹¹  an oath before God ¹²  to be loyal to him. ¹³ 

¹ tn Heb “fathers.”

² tn Heb “the law and the command.”

³ tn Heb “also in Judah the hand of God was to give to them one heart to do the command of the king and the officials by the word of the Lord.”

⁴ tn Heb “told Judah.” The words “the people of” are supplied in the translation for clarity. The Hebrew text uses the name “Judah” here by metonymy for the people of Judah.

⁵ tn Heb “For I have known him.” The verb יָדַע (yada’) here means “to recognize and treat in a special manner, to choose” (see Amos 3:2). It indicates that Abraham stood in a special covenantal relationship with the Lord.

⁶ tn Heb “and they will keep.” The perfect verbal form with vav consecutive carries on the subjective nuance of the preceding imperfect verbal form (translated “so that he may command”).

⁷ tn The infinitive construct here indicates manner, explaining how Abraham’s children and his household will keep the way of the Lord.

⁸ tn Heb “bring on.” The infinitive after לְמַעַן (lÿma’an) indicates result here.

⁹ tn Heb “spoke to.”

¹⁰ tc The Leningrad Codex (the basis of BHS) reads אֲנִי (’ani, 1st person common singular independent personal pronoun): “I obey the king’s command.” Other medieval Hebrew mss and all the versions (LXX, Vulgate, Targum, Syriac Peshitta) preserve an alternate textual tradition of the definite accusative marker אֶת־ (’et) introducing the direct object: אֶת־פִּי־מֶלֶךְ שְׁמוֹר (’et-pi-melekh shÿmor, “Obey the command of the king”). External evidence supports the alternate textual tradition. The MT is guilty of simple orthographic confusion between similar looking letters. The BHS editors and the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project adopt אֶת־ as the original reading. See D. Barthélemy, ed., Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, 3:582–83.

¹¹ tn The phrase “you took” does not appear in the Hebrew text, but is supplied in the translation for smoothness.

¹² tn The genitive-construct שְׁבוּעַת אֱלֹהִים (shÿvu’at ’elohim, “an oath of God”) functions as a genitive of location (“an oath before God”) or an adjectival genitive of attribute (“a supreme oath”).

¹³ tn The words “to be loyal to him” do not appear in the Hebrew text, but are supplied in the translation for clarification.