9:1 Now as Jesus was passing by, 17 he saw a man who had been blind from birth.
1 tn Or “healed.”
2 tn Heb “there will no longer be from there death and miscarriage [or, ‘barrenness’].”
3 tn Heb “will return to you.”
4 tn Heb “man of God” (also in v. 9).
5 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Elisha) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
6 tn The verb is וַיּוֹרֵהוּ (vayyorehu, “and he showed him”). It is the Hiphil preterite from יָרָה (yarah), which has a basic meaning of “to point, show, direct.” It then came to mean “to teach”; it is the verb behind the noun “Law” (תּוֹרָה, torah).
7 tn Or “a [piece of] wood” (cf. NAB, NIV, NRSV, TEV, CEV); NLT “a branch.”
8 tn Heb “he”; the referent (Moses) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
9 tn Heb “there he”; the referent (the Lord) is supplied for clarity.
10 tn Heb “for him” (referring to Israel as a whole).
11 tn This translation interprets the two nouns as a hendiadys: “a statute and an ordinance” becomes “a binding ordinance.”
12 tn The verb נִסָּהוּ (nissahu, “and he tested him [them]”) is from the root נָסָה (nasah). The use of this word in the Bible indicates that there is question, doubt, or uncertainty about the object being tested.
13 tn Grk “said these things.”
14 tn Or “clay” (moistened earth of a clay-like consistency). The textual variant preserved in the Syriac text of Ephraem’s commentary on the Diatessaron (“he made eyes from his clay”) probably arose from the interpretation given by Irenaeus in Against Heresies: “that which the Artificer, the Word, had omitted to form in the womb, he then supplied in public.” This involves taking the clay as an allusion to Gen 2:7, which is very unlikely.
15 tn Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, the conjunction καί (kai) was replaced by a third person pronoun and a new sentence started here in the translation.
16 tn Grk “on his.”
17 tn Or “going along.” The opening words of chap. 9, καὶ παράγων (kai paragwn), convey only the vaguest indication of the circumstances.
18 tn BDAG 697 s.v. οἰκονομία 1.b renders the term here as “divine office.”
19 tn See BDAG 828 s.v. πληρόω 3. The idea here seems to be that the apostle wants to “complete the word of God” in that he wants to preach it to every person in the known world (cf. Rom 15:19). See P. T. O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon (WBC), 82.