27:2 When evil men attack me 1
to devour my flesh, 2
when my adversaries and enemies attack me, 3
they stumble and fall. 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 “draw near to me.”
2 sn To devour my flesh. The psalmist compares his enemies to dangerous, hungry predators (see 2 Kgs 9:36; Ezek 39:17).
3 tn Heb “my adversaries and my enemies against me.” The verb “draw near” (that is, “attack”) is understood by ellipsis; see the previous line.
4 tn The Hebrew verbal forms are perfects. The translation assumes the psalmist is generalizing here, but another option is to take this as a report of past experience, “when evil men attacked me…they stumbled and fell.”
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 Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.
11 tn A new sentence was started here in the translation. Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.
12 tn The final clause could also be turned into an adverbial clause of means: “They will consume her flesh by burning her with fire.”