32:9 It is not the aged 7 who are wise,
nor old men who understand what is right.
1 tn Heb “great.”
2 tn The word means “cattle, livestock, possessions” (see also Gen 26:14). Here it includes the livestock, but also the entire substance of his household.
3 tn Or “amounted to,” “totaled.” The preterite of הָיָה (hayah, “to be”) is sometimes employed to introduce a total amount or an inventory (see Exod 1:5; Num 3:43).
4 tn The word עֲבֻדָּה (’avuddah, “service of household servants”) indicates that he had a very large body of servants, meaning a very large household.
5 tn Heb “and that man.”
6 tn The expression is literally “sons of the east.” The use of the genitive after “sons” in this construction may emphasize their nature (like “sons of belial”); it would refer to them as easterners (like “sons of the south” in contemporary American English). BDB 869 s.v. קֶדֶם says “dwellers in the east.”
7 tn The MT has “the great” or “the many,” meaning great in years according to the parallelism.
8 tn Grk “before.”
9 tn Grk “and he”; because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, the conjunction καί (kai) has not been translated here. Instead a new English sentence is begun in the translation.
10 tn Grk “even from his mother’s womb.” While this idiom may be understood to refer to the point of birth (“even from his birth”), Luke 1:41 suggests that here it should be understood to refer to a time before birth.