Exodus 33:4-5

33:4 When the people heard this troubling word ¹  they mourned; ²  no one put on his ornaments. 33:5 For ³  the Lord had said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites, ‘You are a stiff-necked people. If I went up among you for a moment, ⁴  I might destroy you. Now take off your ornaments, ⁵  that I may know ⁶  what I should do to you.’” ⁷ 

Job 2:12

2:12 But when they gazed intently ⁸  from a distance but did not recognize ⁹  him, they began to weep loudly. Each of them tore his robes, and they threw dust into the air over their heads. ¹⁰ 

Jonah 3:6

3:6 When the news ¹¹  reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, took off his royal robe, put on sackcloth, and sat on ashes.

¹ tn Or “bad news” (NAB, NCV).

² sn The people would rather have risked divine discipline than to go without Yahweh in their midst. So they mourned, and they took off the ornaments. Such had been used in making the golden calf, and so because of their association with all of that they were to be removed as a sign of remorse.

³ tn The verse simply begins “And Yahweh said.” But it is clearly meant to be explanatory for the preceding action of the people.

⁴ tn The construction is formed with a simple imperfect in the first half and a perfect tense with vav (ו) in the second half. Heb “[in] one moment I will go up in your midst and I will destroy you.” The verse is certainly not intended to say that God was about to destroy them. That, plus the fact that he has announced he will not go in their midst, leads most commentators to take this as a conditional clause: “If I were to do such and such, then….”

⁵ tn The Hebrew text also has “from on you.”

⁶ tn The form is the cohortative with a vav (ו) following the imperative; it therefore expresses the purpose or result: “strip off…that I may know.” The call to remove the ornaments must have been perceived as a call to show true repentance for what had happened. If they repented, then God would know how to deal with them.

⁷ tn This last clause begins with the interrogative “what,” but it is used here as an indirect interrogative. It introduces a noun clause, the object of the verb “know.”

⁵ tn Heb “they lifted up their eyes.” The idiom “to lift up the eyes” (or “to lift up the voice”) is intended to show a special intensity in the effort. Here it would indicate that they were trying to see Job from a great distance away.

⁶ tn The Hiphil perfect here should take the nuance of potential perfect – they were not able to recognize him. In other words, this does not mean that they did not know it was Job, only that he did not look anything like the Job they knew.

⁷ tn Heb “they tossed dust skyward over their heads.”

⁷ tn Heb “word” or “matter.”