79:6 Pour out your anger on the nations that do not acknowledge you, 1
on the kingdoms that do not pray to you! 2
135:4 Indeed, 3 the Lord has chosen Jacob for himself,
Israel to be his special possession. 4
10:25 Vent your anger on the nations that do not acknowledge you. 5
Vent it on the peoples 6 who do not worship you. 7
For they have destroyed the people of Jacob. 8
They have completely destroyed them 9
and left their homeland in utter ruin.
1 tn Heb “which do not know you.” Here the Hebrew term “know” means “acknowledge the authority of.”
2 sn The kingdoms that do not pray to you. The people of these kingdoms pray to other gods, not the Lord, because they do not recognize his authority over them.
3 tn Or “for.”
4 sn His special possession. The language echoes Exod 19:5; Deut 7:6; 14:2; 26:18. See also Mal 3:17.
5 tn Heb “know you.” For this use of the word “know” (יָדַע, yada’) see the note on 9:3.
6 tn Heb “tribes/clans.”
7 tn Heb “who do not call on your name.” The idiom “to call on your name” (directed to God) refers to prayer (mainly) and praise. See 1 Kgs 18:24-26 and Ps 116:13, 17. Here “calling on your name” is parallel to “acknowledging you.” In many locations in the OT “name” is equivalent to the person. In the OT, the “name” reflected the person’s character (cf. Gen 27:36; 1 Sam 25:25) or his reputation (Gen 11:4; 2 Sam 8:13). To speak in a person’s name was to act as his representative or carry his authority (1 Sam 25:9; 1 Kgs 21:8). To call someone’s name over something was to claim it for one’s own (2 Sam 12:28).
8 tn Heb “have devoured Jacob.”
9 tn Or “have almost completely destroyed them”; Heb “they have devoured them and consumed them.” The figure of hyperbole is used here; elsewhere Jeremiah and God refer to the fact that they will not be completely consumed. See for example 4:27; 5:10, 18.
10 tn Grk “them, who in.” The relative pronoun (“who”) was replaced by the pronoun “he” (“In past generations he”) and a new sentence was begun in the translation at this point to improve the English style, due to the length of the sentence in Greek and the awkwardness of two relative clauses (“who made the heaven” and “who in past generations”) following one another.
11 tn On this term see BDAG 780 s.v. παροίχομαι. The word is a NT hapax legomenon.
12 tn Or “all the Gentiles” (in Greek the word for “nation” and “Gentile” is the same). The plural here alludes to the variety of false religions in the pagan world.
13 tn Grk “of whom.” Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, a new sentence was started here in the translation.
14 tn The Greek term υἱοθεσία (Juioqesia) was originally a legal technical term for adoption as a son with full rights of inheritance. BDAG 1024 s.v. notes, “a legal t.t. of ‘adoption’ of children, in our lit., i.e. in Paul, only in a transferred sense of a transcendent filial relationship between God and humans (with the legal aspect, not gender specificity, as major semantic component).” Although some modern translations remove the filial sense completely and render the term merely “adoption” (cf. NAB, ESV), the retention of this component of meaning was accomplished in the present translation by the phrase “as sons.”
15 tn Or “cultic service.”
16 tn Or “without Christ.” Both “Christ” (Greek) and “Messiah” (Hebrew and Aramaic) mean “one who has been anointed.” Because the context refers to ancient Israel’s messianic expectation, “Messiah” was employed in the translation at this point rather than “Christ.”
17 tn Or “covenants of the promise.”