48:21 Then Israel said to Joseph, “I am about to die, but God will be with you 1 and will bring you back to the land of your fathers.
23:14 “Look, today I am about to die. 2 You know with all your heart and being 3 that not even one of all the faithful promises the Lord your God made to you is left unfulfilled; every one was realized – not one promise is unfulfilled! 4
2:29 “Now, according to your word, 5 Sovereign Lord, 6 permit 7 your servant 8 to depart 9 in peace.
2:30 For my eyes have seen your salvation 10
1 tn The pronouns translated “you,” “you,” and “your” in this verse are plural in the Hebrew text.
2 tn Heb “go the way of all the earth.”
3 tn Or “soul.”
4 tn Heb “one word from all these words which the
5 sn The phrase according to your word again emphasizes that God will perform his promise.
6 tn The Greek word translated here by “Sovereign Lord” is δεσπότης (despoth").
7 sn This short prophetic declaration is sometimes called the Nunc dimittis, which comes from the opening phrase of the saying in Latin, “now dismiss,” a fairly literal translation of the Greek verb ἀπολύεις (apolueis, “now release”) in this verse.
8 tn Here the Greek word δοῦλος (doulos, “slave”) has been translated “servant” since it acts almost as an honorific term for one specially chosen and appointed to carry out the Lord’s tasks.
9 tn Grk “now release your servant.”
10 sn To see Jesus, the Messiah, is to see God’s salvation.
11 tn Or “was a minister of Syria.” This term could simply refer to an administrative role Quirinius held as opposed to being governor (Josephus, Ant. 18.4.2 [18.88]). See also Luke 2:1.
12 tn Grk “And the devil.”
13 sn In Greek, this phrase is in an emphatic position. In effect, the devil is tempting Jesus by saying, “Look what you can have!”
14 tn Or “authority.” BDAG 353 s.v. ἐξουσία 6 suggests, concerning this passage, that the term means “the sphere in which the power is exercised, domain.” Cf. also Luke 22:53; 23:7; Acts 26:18; Eph 2:2.
15 tn The addendum referring to the glory of the kingdoms of the world forms something of an afterthought, as the following pronoun (“it”) makes clear, for the singular refers to the realm itself.
16 tn For the translation of παραδέδοται (paradedotai) see L&N 57.77. The devil is erroneously implying that God has given him such authority with the additional capability of sharing the honor.
17 tn Grk “in the desert, for forty days being tempted.” The participle πειραζόμενος (peirazomeno") has been translated as an adverbial clause in English to avoid a run-on sentence with a second “and.” Here the present participle suggests a period of forty days of testing. Three samples of the end of the testing are given in the following verses.
18 tn Grk “And he.” Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.
19 sn The reference to Jesus eating nothing could well be an idiom meaning that he ate only what the desert provided; see Exod 34:28. A desert fast simply meant eating only what one could obtain in the desert. The parallel in Matt 4:2 speaks only of Jesus fasting.
20 tn The Greek word here is συντελεσθείσων (suntelesqeiswn) from the verb συντελέω (suntelew).
21 tn Grk “This will be joy and gladness.”
22 tn Or “because of.”
23 tn “At his birth” is more precise as the grammatical subject (1:58), though “at his coming” is a possible force, since it is his mission, as the following verses note, that will really bring joy.