18:24 “‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things, for the nations which I am about to drive out before you 1 have been defiled with all these things. 18:25 Therefore 2 the land has become unclean and I have brought the punishment for its iniquity upon it, 3 so that the land has vomited out its inhabitants. 18:26 You yourselves must obey 4 my statutes and my regulations and must not do any of these abominations, both the native citizen and the resident foreigner in your midst, 5 18:27 for the people who were in the land before you have done all these abominations, 6 and the land has become unclean. 18:28 So do not make the land vomit you out because you defile it 7 just as it has vomited out the nations 8 that were before you. 18:29 For if anyone does any of these abominations, the persons who do them will be cut off from the midst of their people. 9 18:30 You must obey my charge to not practice any of the abominable statutes 10 that have been done before you, so that you do not 11 defile yourselves by them. I am the Lord your God.’”
1 tn Heb “which I am sending away (Piel participle of שָׁלַח [shalakh, “to send”]) from your faces.” The rendering here takes the participle as anticipatory of the coming conquest events.
2 tn Heb “And.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) can be considered to have resultative or even inferential force here.
3 tn Heb “and I have visited its [punishment for] iniquity on it.” See the note on Lev 17:16 above.
4 tn Heb “And you shall keep, you.” The latter emphatic personal pronoun “you” is left out of a few medieval Hebrew
5 tn Heb “the native and the sojourner”; NIV “The native-born and the aliens”; NAB “whether natives or resident aliens.”
6 tn Heb “for all these abominations the men of the land who were before you have done.”
7 tn Heb “And the land will not vomit you out in your defiling it.”
8 tc The MT reads the singular “nation” and is followed by ASV, NASB, NRSV; the LXX, Syriac, and Targum have the plural “nations” (cf. v. 24).
9 sn Regarding the “cut off” penalty see the note on Lev 7:20.
10 tn Heb “to not do from the statutes of the detestable acts.”
11 tn Heb “and you will not.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) can be considered to have resultative force here.
12 tn Heb “over which my name is called.” For this nuance of this idiom cf. BDB 896 s.v. קָרָא Niph.2.d(4) and see the usage in 2 Sam 12:28.
13 tn Or “‘We are safe!’ – safe, you think, to go on doing all those hateful things.” Verses 9-10 are all one long sentence in the Hebrew text. It has been broken up for English stylistic reasons. Somewhat literally it reads “Will you steal…then come and stand…and say, ‘We are safe’ so as to/in order to do…” The Hebrew of v. 9 has a series of infinitives which emphasize the bare action of the verb without the idea of time or agent. The effect is to place a kind of staccato like emphasis on the multitude of their sins all of which are violations of one of the Ten Commandments. The final clause in v. 8 expresses purpose or result (probably result) through another infinitive. This long sentence is introduced by a marker (ה interrogative in Hebrew) introducing a rhetorical question in which God expresses his incredulity that they could do these sins, come into the temple and claim the safety of his protection, and then go right back out and commit the same sins. J. Bright (Jeremiah [AB], 52) catches the force nicely: “What? You think you can steal, murder…and then come and stand…and say, ‘We are safe…’ just so that you can go right on…”
14 tn Heb “be put to death.” The translation follows an alternative reading that appears in several ancient textual witnesses.
15 tn Heb “his blood will be upon him.”
16 tn Heb “a man.”
17 tn The verb is the same one used in verse 10b and suggests forcible sexual violation of the woman.
18 sn Sexual relations with one’s half-sister may be primarily in view here. See Lev 18:9; 20:17.
19 tn On the term φαρμακεία (farmakeia, “magic spells”) see L&N 53.100: “the use of magic, often involving drugs and the casting of spells upon people – ‘to practice magic, to cast spells upon, to engage in sorcery, magic, sorcery.’ φαρμακεία: ἐν τῇ φαρμακείᾳ σου ἐπλανήθησαν πάντα τὰ ἔθνη ‘with your magic spells you deceived all the peoples (of the world)’ Re 18:23.”
20 tn Grk “idolaters.”
21 tn Grk “their share.”
22 tn Traditionally, “brimstone.”
23 tn Grk “sulfur, which is.” The relative pronoun has been translated as “that” to indicate its connection to the previous clause. The nearest logical antecedent is “the lake [that burns with fire and sulfur],” although “lake” (λίμνη, limnh) is feminine gender, while the pronoun “which” (ὅ, Jo) is neuter gender. This means that (1) the proper antecedent could be “their place” (Grk “their share,”) agreeing with the relative pronoun in number and gender, or (2) the neuter pronoun still has as its antecedent the feminine noun “lake,” since agreement in gender between pronoun and antecedent was not always maintained, with an explanatory phrase occurring with a neuter pronoun regardless of the case of the antecedent. In favor of the latter explanation is Rev 20:14, where the phrase “the lake of fire” is in apposition to the phrase “the second death.”