Judges 3:18

3:18 After Ehud brought the tribute payment, he dismissed the people who had carried it. ¹ 

Judges 3:17

3:17 He brought the tribute payment to King Eglon of Moab. (Now Eglon was a very fat man.)

Judges 6:18

6:18 Do not leave this place until I come back ²  with a gift ³  and present it to you.” The Lord said, “I will stay here until you come back.”

Judges 13:19

13:19 Manoah took a young goat and a grain offering and offered them on a rock to the Lord. The Lord’s messenger did an amazing thing as Manoah and his wife watched. ⁴ 

Judges 3:15

3:15 When the Israelites cried out for help to the Lord, he ⁵  raised up a deliverer for them. His name was Ehud son of Gera the Benjaminite, a left-handed man. ⁶  The Israelites sent him to King Eglon of Moab with their tribute payment. ⁷ 

Judges 13:23

13:23 But his wife said to him, “If the Lord wanted to kill us, he would not have accepted the burnt offering and the grain offering from us. ⁸  He would not have shown us all these things, or have spoken to us like this just now.”

¹ tn Heb “the tribute payment.”

² tn The Hebrew text adds “to you,” but this has not been included in the translation for stylistic reasons.

³ tn Heb “and I will bring out my gift.” The precise nuance of the Hebrew word מִנְחָה (minkhah, “gift”) is uncertain in this context. It may refer to a gift offered as a sign of goodwill or submission. In some cases it is used of a gift offered to appease someone whom the offerer has offended. The word can also carry a sacrificial connotation.

³ tc Heb “Doing an extraordinary deed while Manoah and his wife were watching.” The subject of the participle is missing. The translation assumes that the phrase “the Lord’s messenger” was lost by homoioteleuton. If the text originally read לַיהוָה מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה (layhavah mal’akh yÿhvah), the scribe’s eye could have jumped from the first יְהוָה to the second, accidentally omitting two of the three words. Later the conjunction וּ (shureq) would have been added to the following מַפְלִא (mafli’) for syntactical reasons. Another possibility is that a pronominal subject (הוּא, hu’) has been lost in the MT due to haplography.

⁴ tn Heb “the Lord.” This has been replaced by the pronoun (“he”) in the translation for stylistic reasons.

⁵ tn The phrase, which refers to Ehud, literally reads “bound/restricted in the right hand,” apparently a Hebrew idiom for a left-handed person. See Judg 20:16, where 700 Benjaminites are described in this way. Perhaps the Benjaminites purposely trained several of their young men to be left-handed warriors by restricting the use of the right hand from an early age so the left hand would become dominant. Left-handed men would have a distinct military advantage, especially when attacking city gates. See B. Halpern, “The Assassination of Eglon: The First Locked-Room Murder Mystery,” BRev 4 (1988): 35.

⁶ tn Heb “The Israelites sent by his hand an offering to Eglon, king of Moab.”

⁵ tn Heb “our hand.”