11:3 Will your idle talk 1 reduce people to silence, 2
and will no one rebuke 3 you when you mock? 4
24:12 From the city the dying 5 groan,
and the wounded 6 cry out for help,
but God charges no one with wrongdoing. 7
1 tn The word means “chatter, pratings, boastings” (see Isa 16:6; Jer 48:30).
2 tn The verb חָרַשׁ (kharash) in the Hiphil means “to silence” (41:4); here it functions in a causative sense, “reduce to silence.”
3 tn The form מַכְלִם (makhlim, “humiliating, mocking”) is the Hiphil participle. The verb כָּלַם (kalam) has the meaning “cover with shame, insult” (Job 20:3).
4 tn The construction shows the participle to be in the circumstantial clause: “will you mock – and [with] no one rebuking.”
5 tc The MT as pointed reads “from the city of men they groan.” Most commentators change one vowel in מְתִים (mÿtim) to get מֵתִים (metim) to get the active participle, “the dying.” This certainly fits the parallelism better, although sense could be made out of the MT.
6 tn Heb “the souls of the wounded,” which here refers to the wounded themselves.
7 tc The MT has the noun תִּפְלָה (tiflah) which means “folly; tastelessness” (cf. 1:22). The verb, which normally means “to place; to put,” would then be rendered “to impute; to charge.” This is certainly a workable translation in the context. Many commentators have emended the text, changing the noun to תְּפִלָּה (tÿfillah, “prayer”), and so then also the verb יָשִׂים (yasim, here “charges”) to יִשְׁמַע (yishma’, “hears”). It reads: “But God does not hear the prayer” – referring to the groans.