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. ¹ 

Ecclesiastes 8:2

8:2 Obey the king’s command, ² 

because you took ³  an oath before God ⁴  to be loyal to him. ⁵ 

Romans 13:5

13:5 Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of the wrath of the authorities ⁶  but also because of your conscience. ⁷ 

¹ 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.”

² 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.

³ tn The phrase “you took” does not appear in the Hebrew text, but is supplied in the translation for smoothness.

⁴ 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”).

⁵ tn The words “to be loyal to him” do not appear in the Hebrew text, but are supplied in the translation for clarification.

⁶ tn Grk “its wrath”; the referent (the governing authorities) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

⁷ tn Grk “because of (the) conscience,” but the English possessive “your” helps to show whose conscience the context implies.