46:9 Remember what I accomplished in antiquity! 1
Truly I am God, I have no peer; 2
I am God, and there is none like me,
65:17 For look, I am ready to create
new heavens and a new earth! 3
The former ones 4 will not be remembered;
no one will think about them anymore. 5
8:1 You must keep carefully all these commandments 9 I am giving 10 you today so that you may live, increase in number, 11 and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised to your ancestors. 12
16:14 Yet 13 I, the Lord, say: 14 “A new time will certainly come. 15 People now affirm their oaths with ‘I swear as surely as the Lord lives who delivered the people of Israel out of Egypt.’ 16:15 But in that time they will affirm them with ‘I swear as surely as the Lord lives who delivered the people of Israel from the land of the north and from all the other lands where he had banished them.’ At that time I will bring them back to the land I gave their ancestors.” 16
23:7 “So I, the Lord, say: 17 ‘A new time will certainly come. 18 People now affirm their oaths with “I swear as surely as the Lord lives who delivered the people of Israel out of Egypt.” 23:8 But at that time they will affirm them with “I swear as surely as the Lord lives who delivered the descendants of the former nation of Israel 19 from the land of the north and from all the other lands where he had banished 20 them.” 21 At that time they will live in their own land.’”
1 tn Heb “remember the former things, from antiquity”; KJV, ASV “the former things of old.”
2 tn Heb “and there is no other” (so NASB, NIV, NRSV).
3 sn This hyperbolic statement likens the coming transformation of Jerusalem (see vv. 18-19) to a new creation of the cosmos.
4 tn Or perhaps, “the former things” (so ASV, NASB, NIV, NRSV); TEV “The events of the past.”
5 tn Heb “and they will not come up on the mind.”
6 tn Heb “recalling, you must recall.” The Hebrew text uses the infinitive absolute before the finite verb for emphasis. Cf. KJV, ASV “shalt well remember.”
7 tn Heb “the
8 tn Or “wilderness” (so KJV, NRSV, NLT); likewise in v. 15.
9 tn The singular term (מִצְוָה, mitsvah) includes the whole corpus of covenant stipulations, certainly the book of Deuteronomy at least (cf. Deut 5:28; 6:1, 25; 7:11; 11:8, 22; 15:5; 17:20; 19:9; 27:1; 30:11; 31:5). The plural (מִצְוֹת, mitsot) refers to individual stipulations (as in vv. 2, 6).
10 tn Heb “commanding” (so NASB). For stylistic reasons, to avoid redundancy, “giving” has been used in the translation (likewise in v. 11).
11 tn Heb “multiply” (so KJV, NASB, NLT); NIV, NRSV “increase.”
12 tn Heb “fathers” (also in vv. 16, 18).
13 tn The particle translated here “Yet” (לָכֵן, lakhen) is regularly translated “So” or “Therefore” and introduces a consequence. However, in a few cases it introduces a contrasting set of conditions. Compare its use in Judg 11:8; Jer 48:12; 49:2; 51:52; and Hos 2:14 (2:16 HT).
14 tn Heb “Oracle of the
15 tn Heb “Behold the days are coming.”
16 tn These two verses which constitute one long sentence with compound, complex subordinations has been broken up for sake of English style. It reads, “Therefore, behold the days are coming, says the
17 tn Heb “Oracle of the
18 tn Heb “Behold the days are coming.”
19 tn Heb “descendants of the house of Israel.”
20 tc It is probably preferable to read the third masculine singular plus suffix (הִדִּיחָם, hiddikham) here with the Greek version and the parallel passage in 16:15 rather than the first singular plus suffix in the MT (הִדַּחְתִּים, hiddakhtim). If this is not a case of mere graphic confusion, the MT could have arisen under the influence of the first person in v. 3. Though sudden shifts in person have been common in the book of Jeremiah, that is unlikely in a context reporting an oath.
21 tn This passage is the same as 16:14-15 with a few minor variations in Hebrew wording. The notes on that passage should be consulted for the rendering here. This passage has the Niphal of the verb “to say” rather than the impersonal use of the Qal. It adds the idea of “bringing out” to the idea of “bringing up out” and (Heb “who brought up and who brought out,” probably a case of hendiadys) before “the people [here “seed” rather than “children”] of Israel [here “house of Israel”] from the land of the north.” These are minor variations and do not affect the sense in any way. So the passage is rendered in much the same way.
22 tn Heb “about the shepherds who are shepherding my people. ‘You have caused my sheep….’” For the metaphor see the study note on the previous verse.
23 tn Heb “Therefore, thus says the
24 tn Heb “Oracle of the
25 sn Put off all such things. The commands in vv. 8-9 are based on two reasons given in vv. 9-10 – reasons which are expressed in terms of a metaphor about clothing oneself. Paul says that they have put off the old man and have put on the new man. Two things need to be discussed in reference to Paul’s statement. (1) What is the meaning of the clothing imagery (i.e., the “have put off” and “have been clothed”)? (2) What is the meaning of the old man and the new man? Though some commentators understand the participles “have put off” (v. 9) and “have been clothed” (v. 10) as imperatives (i.e., “put off!” and “put on!”), this use of participles is extremely rare in the NT and thus unlikely here. It is better to take them as having the semantic force of indicatives, and thus they give an explanation of what had happened to the Colossians at the time of their conversion – they had taken off the old man and put on the new when they trusted in Christ (cf. 1:4). While it is difficult to say for certain what the background to Paul’s “clothing” metaphor might be (whether it is primarily Jewish and comes from the OT, or primarily Gentile and comes from some facet of the Greco-Roman religious milieu), it is nonetheless clear, on the basis of Paul’s usage of the expression, that the old man refers to man as he is in Adam and dominated by sin (cf. Rom 6:6; Eph 4:22), while the new man refers to the Christian whose new sphere of existence is in Christ. Though the metaphor of clothing oneself primarily reflects outward actions, there is a distinct inward aspect to it, as the rest of v. 10 indicates: being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it. Paul’s point, then, is that Christians should take off their dirty clothing (inappropriate behavior) and put on clean clothing (behavior consistent with knowing Christ) because this has already been accomplished in a positional sense at the time of their conversion (cf. Gal 3:27 with Rom 13:14).