13:23 Also in those days I saw the men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. 13:24 Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod (or the language of one of the other peoples mentioned 10 ) and were unable to speak the language of Judah. 13:25 So I entered a complaint with them. I called down a curse on them, and I struck some of the men and pulled out their hair. I had them swear by God saying, “You will not marry off 11 your daughters to their sons, and you will not take any of their daughters as wives for your sons or for yourselves! 13:26 Was it not because of things like these that King Solomon of Israel sinned? Among the many nations there was no king like him. He was loved by his God, and God made 12 him king over all Israel. But the foreign wives made even him sin! 13:27 Should we then in your case hear that you do all this great evil, thereby being unfaithful to our God by marrying 13 foreign wives?”
13:28 Now one of the sons of Joiada son of Eliashib the high priest was a son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite. So I banished him from my sight.
13:29 Please remember them, O my God, because they have defiled the priesthood, the covenant of the priesthood, 14 and the Levites.
11:1 So I ask, God has not rejected his people, has he? Absolutely not! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.
1 tn Heb “For I have known him.” The verb יָדַע (yada’) here means “to recognize and treat in a special manner, to choose” (see Amos 3:2). It indicates that Abraham stood in a special covenantal relationship with the
2 tn Heb “and they will keep.” The perfect verbal form with vav consecutive carries on the subjective nuance of the preceding imperfect verbal form (translated “so that he may command”).
3 tn The infinitive construct here indicates manner, explaining how Abraham’s children and his household will keep the way of the
4 tn Heb “bring on.” The infinitive after לְמַעַן (lÿma’an) indicates result here.
5 tn Heb “spoke to.”
6 tn Heb “these.”
7 tn Heb “their records were searched for in the genealogical materials, but were not found.” This passive construction has been translated as active for stylistic reasons.
8 tn Heb “they were desecrated.”
9 tn Heb “the holy seed,” referring to the Israelites as God’s holy people.
10 tn Heb “people and people.”
11 tn Heb “give.”
12 tn Heb “gave.”
13 tn Heb “give a dwelling to.”
14 tc One medieval Hebrew
15 map For location see Map5-B1; Map6-F3; Map7-E2; Map8-F2; Map10-B3; JP1-F4; JP2-F4; JP3-F4; JP4-F4.
16 tn Or perhaps “secularized”; cf. NIV “desecrated”; TEV, NLT “defiled”; CEV “disgraced.”
17 tn Heb “has married the daughter of a foreign god.” Marriage is used here as a metaphor to describe Judah’s idolatry, that is, her unfaithfulness to the
18 tn Heb “and not one has done, and a remnant of the spirit to him.” The very elliptical nature of the statement suggests it is proverbial. The present translation represents an attempt to clarify the meaning of the statement (cf. NASB).
19 tn Heb “the one.” This is an oblique reference to Abraham who sought to obtain God’s blessing by circumventing God’s own plan for him by taking Hagar as wife (Gen 16:1-6). The result of this kind of intermarriage was, of course, disastrous (Gen 16:11-12).
20 sn The wife he took in his youth probably refers to the first wife one married (cf. NCV “the wife you married when you were young”).
21 tn Grk “firstfruits,” a term for the first part of something that has been set aside and offered to God before the remainder can be used.
22 sn Most interpreters see Paul as making use of a long-standing metaphor of the olive tree (the root…the branches) as a symbol for Israel. See, in this regard, Jer 11:16, 19. A. T. Hanson, Studies in Paul’s Technique and Theology, 121-24, cites rabbinic use of the figure of the olive tree, and goes so far as to argue that Rom 11:17-24 is a midrash on Jer 11:16-19.
23 tc διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτοῦ (dia tou {aimato" autou, “through his blood”) is read at this juncture by several minuscule