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 33:6 So the Israelites stripped off their ornaments by Mount Horeb.
47:3 Let your private parts be exposed!
Your genitals will be on display! 10
I will get revenge;
I will not have pity on anyone,” 11
2:3 Otherwise, I will strip her naked,
and expose her like she was when she was born.
I will turn her land into a wilderness
and make her country a parched land,
so that I might kill 12 her with thirst.
1:11 Residents 13 of Shaphir, 14 pass by in nakedness and humiliation! 15
The residents of Zaanan can’t leave their city. 16
Beth Ezel 17 mourns, 18
“He takes from you what he desires.” 19
16:15 (Look! I will come like a thief!
Blessed is the one who stays alert and does not lose 27 his clothes so that he will not have to walk around naked and his shameful condition 28 be seen.) 29
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.”
8 tn Heb “and he said.”
9 tn Heb “your sound.” If one sees a storm theophany here (see the note on the word “time” in v. 8), then one could translate, “your powerful voice.”
10 tn Heb “Your shame will be seen.” In this context “shame” is a euphemism referring to the genitals.
11 tn Heb “I will not meet a man.” The verb פָּגַע (pagah) apparently carries the nuance “meet with kindness” here (cf. 64:5, and see BDB 803 s.v. Qal.2).
12 tn Heb “and kill her with thirst.” The vav prefixed to the verb (וַהֲמִתִּיהָ, vahamittiha) introduces a purpose/result clause: “in order to make her die of thirst” (purpose) or “and thus make her die of thirst” (result).
13 tn The Hebrew participial form, which is feminine singular, is here used in a collective sense for the all the residents of the town. See GKC 394 §122.s.
14 sn The place name Shaphir means “pleasant” in Hebrew.
15 tn The imperatival form is used rhetorically, emphasizing that the inhabitants of Shaphir will pass by into exile.
16 tn Heb “have not come out”; NIV “will not come out”; NLT “dare not come outside.”
17 sn The place name Beth Ezel means “house of nearness” or “house of proximity” in Hebrew.
18 tn Heb “the lamentation of Beth Ezel.” The following words could be the lamentation offered up by Beth Ezel (subjective genitive) or the mourning song sung over it (objective genitive).
19 tc The form עֶמְדָּתוֹ (’emdato) should be emended to חֲמַדְּתוֹ (khamadto, “his (the conqueror’s) desire”).
20 tn Grk “and have become rich.” The semantic domains of the two terms for wealth here, πλούσιος (plousios, adjective) and πλουτέω (ploutew, verb) overlap considerably, but are given slightly different English translations for stylistic reasons.
21 tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “but” to indicate the contrast present in this context.
22 tn All the terms in this series are preceded by καί (kai) in the Greek text, but contemporary English generally uses connectives only between the last two items in such a series.
23 tn Grk “I counsel you to buy.”
24 tn Grk “rich, and.” Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, a new sentence was started here in the translation, repeating the words “Buy from me” to make the connection clear for the English reader.
25 tn Grk “the shame of the nakedness of you,” which has been translated as an attributed genitive like καινότητι ζωῆς (kainothti zwh") in Rom 6:4 (ExSyn 89-90).
26 sn The city of Laodicea had a famous medical school and exported a powder (called a “Phrygian powder”) that was widely used as an eye salve. It was applied to the eyes in the form of a paste the consistency of dough (the Greek term for the salve here, κολλούριον, kollourion [Latin collyrium], is a diminutive form of the word for a long roll of bread).
27 tn Grk “and keeps.” BDAG 1002 s.v. τηρέω 2.c states “of holding on to someth. so as not to give it up or lose it…τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ Rv 16:15 (or else he will have to go naked).”
28 tn On the translation of ἀσχημοσύνη (aschmosunh) as “shameful condition” see L&N 25.202. The indefinite third person plural (“and they see”) has been translated as a passive here.
29 sn These lines are parenthetical, forming an aside to the narrative. The speaker here is the Lord Jesus Christ himself rather than the narrator. Many interpreters have seen this verse as so abrupt that it could not be an original part of the work, but the author has used such asides before (1:7; 14:13) and the suddenness here (on the eve of Armageddon) is completely parallel to Jesus’ warning in Mark 13:15-16 and parallels.