11:5 Then the Spirit of the Lord came 1 upon me and said to me, “Say: This is what the Lord says: ‘This is what you are thinking, 2 O house of Israel; I know what goes through your minds. 3
38:10 “‘This is what the sovereign Lord says: On that day thoughts will come into your mind, 4 and you will devise an evil plan.
139:2 You know when I sit down and when I get up;
even from far away you understand my motives.
19:21 There are many plans 5 in a person’s mind, 6
but it 7 is the counsel 8 of the Lord which will stand.
מ (Mem)
3:37 Whose command was ever fulfilled 9
unless the Lord 10 decreed it?
1 tn Heb “fell.”
2 tn The Hebrew verb commonly means “to say,” but may also mean “to think” (see also v. 3).
3 tn Heb “I know the steps of your spirits.”
4 tn Heb “words will go up upon your heart.”
5 sn The plans (from the Hebrew verb חָשַׁב [khashav], “to think; to reckon; to devise”) in the human heart are many. But only those which God approves will succeed.
6 tn Heb “in the heart of a man” (cf. NAB, NIV). Here “heart” is used for the seat of thoughts, plans, and reasoning, so the translation uses “mind.” In contemporary English “heart” is more often associated with the seat of emotion than with the seat of planning and reasoning.
7 tn Heb “but the counsel of the
8 tn The antithetical parallelism pairs “counsel” with “plans.” “Counsel of the
9 tn Heb “Who is this, he spoke and it came to pass?” The general sense is to ask whose commands are fulfilled. The phrase “he spoke and it came to pass” is taken as an allusion to the creation account (see Gen 1:3).
10 tc The MT reads אֲדֹנָי (’adonay, “the Lord”) here rather than יהוה (YHWH, “the