Deuteronomy 28:33

28:33 As for the produce of your land and all your labor, a people you do not know will consume it, and you will be nothing but oppressed and crushed for the rest of your lives.

Deuteronomy 28:43

28:43 The foreigners ¹  who reside among you will become higher and higher over you and you will become lower and lower.

Psalms 39:6

39:6 Surely people go through life as mere ghosts. ² 

Surely they accumulate worthless wealth

without knowing who will eventually haul it away.” ³ 

Lamentations 5:2

5:2 Our inheritance ⁴  is turned over to strangers;

foreigners now occupy our homes. ⁵ 

Hosea 7:9

7:9 Foreigners are consuming what his strenuous labor produced, ⁶ 

but he does not recognize it!

His head is filled with gray hair,

but he does not realize it!

¹ tn Heb “the foreigner.” This is a collective singular and has therefore been translated as plural; this includes the pronouns in the following verse, which are also singular in the Hebrew text.

² tn Heb “surely, as an image man walks about.” The preposition prefixed to “image” indicates identity here.

³ tc Heb “Surely [in] vain they strive, he accumulates and does not know who gathers them.” The MT as it stands is syntactically awkward. The verb forms switch from singular (“walks about”) to plural (“they strive”) and then back to singular (“accumulates and does not know”), even though the subject (generic “man”) remains the same. Furthermore there is no object for the verb “accumulates” and no plural antecedent for the plural pronoun (“them”) attached to “gathers.” These problems can be removed if one emends the text from הֶבֶל יֶהֱמָיוּן (hevel yehemaun, “[in] vain they strive”) to הֶבְלֵי הָמוֹן (hevley hamon, “vain things of wealth”). This assumes a misdivision in the MT and a virtual dittography of vav (ו) between the mem and nun of המון. The present translation follows this emendation.

⁴ tn Heb “Our inheritance”; or “Our inherited possessions/property.” The term נַחֲלָה (nakhalah) has a range of meanings: (1) “inheritance,” (2) “portion, share” and (3) “possession, property.” The land of Canaan was given by the Lord to Israel as its inheritance (Deut 4:21; 15:4; 19:10; 20:16; 21:23; 24:4; 25:19; 26:1; Josh 20:6) and distributed among the tribes, clans and families (Num 16:14; 36:2; Deut 29:7; Josh 11:23; 13:6; 14:3, 13; 17:4, 6, 14; 19:49; 23:4; Judg 18:1; Ezek 45:1; 47:22, 29). Through the family, the family provided an inheritance (property) to its children with the first-born receiving pride of position (Gen 31:14; Num 27:7-11; 36:3, 8; 1 Kgs 21:3, 4; Job 42:15; Prov 19:14; Ezek 46:16). Here, the parallelism between “our inheritance” and “our homes” would allow for the specific referent of the phrase “our inheritance” to be (1) land or (2) material possessions, or given the nature of the poetry in Lamentations, to carry both meanings at the same time.

⁵ tn Heb “our homes [are turned over] to foreigners.”

⁶ tn Heb “foreigners consume his strength”; NRSV “devour (sap NIV) his strength.”