6:15 You will plant crops, but will not harvest them;
you will squeeze oil from the olives, 9 but you will have no oil to rub on your bodies; 10
you will squeeze juice from the grapes, but you will have no wine to drink. 11
1 tn Or “I also” (see HALOT 76 s.v. אַף 6.b).
2 tn Heb “soul.” These expressions may refer either to the physical effects of consumption and fever as the rendering in the text suggests (e.g., J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 452, 454, “diminishing eyesight and loss of appetite”), or perhaps the more psychological effects, “which exhausts the eyes” because of anxious hope “and causes depression” (Heb “causes soul [נֶפֶשׁ, nefesh] to pine away”), e.g., B. A. Levine, Leviticus (JPSTC), 185.
3 tn Heb “and.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) can be considered to have causal force here.
4 tn That is, “your enemies will eat” the produce that grows from the sown seed.
5 tc For MT reading שָׁגַל (shagal, “ravish; violate”), the Syriac, Targum, and Vulgate presume the less violent שָׁכַב (shakhav, “lie with”). The unexpected counterpart to betrothal here favors the originality of the MT.
6 tn Heb “it” (so NRSV), a collective singular referring to the invading nation (several times in this verse and v. 52).
7 tn Heb “increase of herds.”
8 tn Heb “growth of flocks.”
9 tn Heb “you will tread olives.” Literally treading on olives with one’s feet could be harmful and would not supply the necessary pressure to release the oil. See O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, 119. The Hebrew term דָּרַךְ (darakh) may have an idiomatic sense of “press” here, or perhaps the imagery of the following parallel line (referring to treading grapes) has dictated the word choice.
10 tn Heb “but you will not rub yourselves with oil.”
11 tn Heb “and juice, but you will not drink wine.” The verb תִדְרֹךְ (tidrokh, “you will tread”) must be supplied from the preceding line.