Deuteronomy 4:2

4:2 Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I am delivering to ¹  you.

Deuteronomy 13:18

13:18 Thus you must obey the Lord your God, keeping all his commandments that I am giving ²  you today and doing what is right ³  before him. ⁴ 

Joshua 1:7

1:7 Make sure you are ⁵  very strong and brave! Carefully obey ⁶  all the law my servant Moses charged you to keep! ⁷  Do not swerve from it to the right or to the left, so that you may be successful ⁸  in all you do. ⁹ 

Proverbs 30:6

30:6 Do not add to his words,

lest he reprove you, and prove you to be a liar. ¹⁰ 

Matthew 28:20

28:20 teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, ¹¹  I am with you ¹²  always, to the end of the age.” ¹³ 

Revelation 22:18-19

22:18 I testify to the one who hears the words of the prophecy contained in this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described ¹⁴  in this book. 22:19 And if anyone takes away from the words of this book of prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life ¹⁵  and in the holy city that are described in this book.

[4:2]  ¹ tn Heb “commanding.”

[13:18]  ² tn Heb “commanding” (so NASB, NRSV).

[13:18]  ³ tc The LXX and Smr add “and good” to bring the phrase in line with a familiar cliché (cf. Deut 6:18; Josh 9:25; 2 Kgs 10:3; 2 Chr 14:1; etc.). This is an unnecessary and improper attempt to force a text into a preconceived mold.

[13:18]  ⁴ tn Heb “in the eyes of the Lord your God.” See note on the word “him” in v. 3.

[1:7]  ⁵ tn Or “Only be.”

[1:7]  ⁶ tn Heb “so you can be careful to do.” The use of the infinitive לִשְׁמֹר (lishmor, “to keep”) after the imperatives suggests that strength and bravery will be necessary for obedience. Another option is to take the form לִשְׁמֹר as a vocative lamed (ל) with imperative (see Isa 38:20 for an example of this construction), which could be translated, “Indeed, be careful!”

[1:7]  ⁷ tn Heb “commanded you.”

[1:7]  ⁸ tn Heb “be wise,” but the word can mean “be successful” by metonymy.

[1:7]  ⁹ tn Heb “in all which you go.”

[30:6]  ¹⁰ tn The form of the verb is a Niphal perfect tense with a vav consecutive from the root כָּזַב (kazav, “to lie”). In this stem it has the ideas of “been made deceptive,” or “shown to be false” or “proved to be a liar.” One who adds to or changes the word of the Lord will be seen as a liar.

[28:20]  ¹¹ tn The Greek word ἰδού (idou) has been translated here as “remember” (BDAG 468 s.v. 1.c).

[28:20]  ¹² sn I am with you. Matthew’s Gospel begins with the prophecy that the Savior’s name would be “Emmanuel, that is, ‘God with us,’” (1:23, in which the author has linked Isa 7:14 and 8:8, 10 together) and it ends with Jesus’ promise to be with his disciples forever. The Gospel of Matthew thus forms an inclusio about Jesus in his relationship to his people that suggests his deity.

[28:20]  ¹³ tc Most mss (A^c Θ Ë¹³ Ï it sy) have ἀμήν (amhn, “amen”) at the end of v. 20. Such a conclusion is routinely added by scribes to NT books because a few of these books originally had such an ending (cf. Rom 16:27; Gal 6:18; Jude 25). A majority of Greek witnesses have the concluding ἀμήν in every NT book except Acts, James, and 3 John (and even in these books, ἀμήν is found in some witnesses). It is thus a predictable variant. Further, no good reason exists for the omission of the particle in significant and early witnesses such as א A* B D W ˹ 33 al lat sa.

[22:18]  ¹⁴ tn Grk “written.”

[22:19]  ¹⁵ tc The Textus Receptus, on which the KJV rests, reads “the book” of life (ἀπὸ βίβλου, apo biblou) instead of “the tree” of life. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the NT he had access to no Greek mss for the last six verses of Revelation. So he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek at this point. As a result he created seventeen textual variants which were not in any Greek mss. The most notorious of these is this reading. It is thus decidedly inauthentic, while “the tree” of life, found in the best and virtually all Greek mss, is clearly authentic. The confusion was most likely due to an intra-Latin switch: The form of the word for “tree” in Latin in this passage is ligno; the word for “book” is libro. The two-letter difference accounts for an accidental alteration in some Latin mss; that “book of life” as well as “tree of life” is a common expression in the Apocalypse probably accounts for why this was not noticed by Erasmus or the KJV translators. (This textual problem is not discussed in NA²⁷.)