2 Kings 21:16

21:16 Furthermore Manasseh killed so many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to end, ¹  in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight of the Lord. ² 

Numbers 35:33

35:33 “You must not pollute the land where you live, for blood defiles the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed there, except by the blood of the person who shed it.

Deuteronomy 19:10

19:10 You must not shed innocent blood ³  in your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, for that would make you guilty. ⁴ 

Jeremiah 2:34

2:34 Even your clothes are stained with

the lifeblood of the poor who had not done anything wrong;

you did not catch them breaking into your homes. ⁵ 

Yet, in spite of all these things you have done, ⁶ 

Jeremiah 19:4

19:4 I will do so because these people ⁷  have rejected me and have defiled ⁸  this place. They have offered sacrifices in it to other gods which neither they nor their ancestors ⁹  nor the kings of Judah knew anything about. They have filled it with the blood of innocent children. ¹⁰ 

¹ tn Heb “and also Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, until he filled Jerusalem from mouth to mouth.”

² tn Heb “apart from his sin which he caused Judah to commit, by doing what is evil in the eyes of the Lord.”

³ tn Heb “innocent blood must not be shed.” The Hebrew phrase דָּם נָקִי (dam naqiy) means the blood of a person to whom no culpability or responsibility adheres because what he did was without malice aforethought (HALOT 224 s.v דָּם 4.b).

⁴ tn Heb “and blood will be upon you” (cf. KJV, ASV); NRSV “thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you.”

⁵ tn The words “for example” are implicit and are supplied in the translation for clarification. This is only one example of why their death was not legitimate.

⁶ tn KJV and ASV read this line with 2:34. The ASV makes little sense and the KJV again erroneously reads the archaic second person feminine singular perfect as first person common singular. All the modern English versions and commentaries take this line with 2:35.

⁷ tn The text merely has “they.” But since a reference is made later to “they” and “their ancestors,” the referent must be to the people that the leaders of the people and leaders of the priests represent.

⁸ sn Heb “have made this city foreign.” The verb here is one that is built off of the noun and adjective which relate to foreign nations. Comparison may be made to Jer 2:21 where the adjective refers to the strange, wild vine as opposed to the choice vine the Lord planted and to 5:19 and 8:19 where the noun is used of worshiping foreign gods. Israel through its false worship has “denationalized” itself in its relation to God.

⁹ tn Heb “fathers.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “the blood of innocent ones.” This must be a reference to child sacrifice as explained in the next verse. Some have seen a reference to the sins of social injustice alluded to in 2 Kgs 21:16 and 24:4 but those are connected with the city itself. Hence the word children is supplied in the translation to make the referent explicit.