Jeremiah 14:14-15

14:14 Then the Lord said to me, “Those prophets are prophesying lies while claiming my authority! ¹  I did not send them. I did not commission them. ²  I did not speak to them. They are prophesying to these people false visions, worthless predictions, ³  and the delusions of their own mind. 14:15 I did not send those prophets, though they claim to be prophesying in my name. They may be saying, ‘No war or famine will happen in this land.’ But I, the Lord, say this about ⁴  them: ‘War and starvation will kill those prophets.’ ⁵ 

Jeremiah 44:11

44:11 “Because of this, the Lord God of Israel who rules over all says, ‘I am determined to bring disaster on you, ⁶  even to the point of destroying all the Judeans here. ⁷ 

Jeremiah 44:29

44:29 Moreover the Lord says, ⁸  ‘I will make something happen to prove that I will punish you in this place. I will do it so that you will know that my threats to bring disaster on you will prove true. ⁹ 

Leviticus 20:3

20:3 I myself will set my face ¹⁰  against that man and cut him off from the midst of his people, ¹¹  because he has given some of his children to Molech and thereby defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name. ¹² 

Leviticus 26:17

26:17 I will set my face against you. You will be struck down before your enemies, those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee when there is no one pursuing you.

Deuteronomy 18:20

18:20 “But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized ¹³  him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die.

Deuteronomy 29:20

29:20 The Lord will be unwilling to forgive him, and his intense anger ¹⁴  will rage ¹⁵  against that man; all the curses ¹⁶  written in this scroll will fall upon him ¹⁷  and the Lord will obliterate his name from memory. ¹⁸ 

Psalms 34:16

34:16 But the Lord opposes evildoers

and wipes out all memory of them from the earth. ¹⁹ 

Ezekiel 13:8

13:8 “‘Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because you have spoken false words and forecast delusion, look, ²⁰  I am against you, ²¹  declares the sovereign Lord.

Ezekiel 13:20

13:20 “‘Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Take note ²²  that I am against your wristbands with which you entrap people’s lives ²³  like birds. I will tear them from your arms and will release the people’s lives, which you hunt like birds.

Ezekiel 15:7

15:7 I will set ²⁴  my face against them – although they have escaped from the fire, ²⁵  the fire will still consume them! Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I set my face against them.

Ezekiel 15:1

Burning a Useless Vine

15:1 The word of the Lord came to me:

Ezekiel 3:12

Ezekiel Before the Exiles

3:12 Then a wind lifted me up ²⁶  and I heard a great rumbling sound behind me as the glory of the Lord rose from its place, ²⁷ 

[14:14]  ¹ tn Heb “Falsehood those prophets are prophesying in my name.” 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 someone’s name was to act as his representative or carry his authority (1 Sam 25:9; 1 Kgs 21:8).

[14:14]  ² tn Heb “I did not command them.” Compare 1 Chr 22:12 for usage.

[14:14]  ³ tn Heb “divination and worthlessness.” The noun “worthlessness” stands as a qualifying “of” phrase (= to an adjective; an attributive genitive in Hebrew) after a noun in Zech 11:17; Job 13:4. This is an example of hendiadys where two nouns are joined by “and” with one serving as the qualifier of the other.

[14:15]  ⁴ tn Heb “Thus says the Lord about.” The first person construction has been used in the translation for better English style.

[14:15]  ⁵ tn Heb “Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who are prophesying in my name and I did not send them [= whom I did not send] and they are saying [= who are saying], ‘Sword and famine…’, by sword and famine those prophets will be killed.” This sentence has been restructured to conform to contemporary English style.

[44:11]  ⁶ tn Heb “Behold I am setting my face against you for evil/disaster.” For the meaning of the idiom “to set the face to/against” see the translator’s note on 42:15 and compare the references listed there.

[44:11]  ⁷ tn Heb “and to destroy all Judah.” However, this statement must be understood within the rhetoric of the passage (see vv. 7-8 and the study note on v. 8) and within the broader context of the Lord’s promises to restore the remnant who are in Babylon and those scattered in other lands (23:3; 24:5-6; 29:14; 30:3; 32:27). In this context “all Judah” must refer to all the Judeans living in Egypt whom Jeremiah is now addressing. This involves the figure of synecdoche where all does not extend to all individuals but to all that are further specified or implied (see E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech, 616-18, and the comments in H. Freedman, Jeremiah [SoBB], 285). The “and” in front of “to destroy” is to be understood as an example of the epexegetical use of the conjunction ו (vav; see BDB 252 s.v. וַ 1.b and compare the translation of J. Bright, Jeremiah [AB], 260).

[44:29]  ⁸ tn Heb “oracle of the Lord.”

[44:29]  ⁹ tn Heb “This will be to you the sign, oracle of the Lord, that I will punish you in this place in order that you may know that my threats against you for evil/disaster/harm will certainly stand [see the translator’s note on the preceding verse for the meaning of this word here].” The word “sign” refers to an event that is a pre-omen or portent of something that will happen later (see BDB 16 s.v. אוֹת 2 and compare usage in 1 Sam 14:10; 2 Kgs 19:29). The best way to carry that idea across in this context seems to be “I will make something happen to prove [or portend].” Another possibility would be “I will give you a pre-omen that,” but many readers would probably not be familiar with “omen/pre-omen.” Again the sentence has been broken in two and restructured to better conform with English style.

[20:3]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “And I, I shall give my faces.”

[20:3]  ¹¹ sn On the “cut off” penalty see the notes on Lev 7:20 and 17:4.

[20:3]  ¹² tn Heb “for the sake of defiling my sanctuary and to profane my holy name.”

[18:20]  ¹³ tn Or “commanded” (so KJV, NAB, NIV, NRSV).

[29:20]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “the wrath of the Lord and his zeal.” The expression is a hendiadys, a figure in which the second noun becomes adjectival to the first.

[29:20]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “smoke,” or “smolder.”

[29:20]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “the entire oath.”

[29:20]  ¹⁷ tn Or “will lie in wait against him.”

[29:20]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “blot out his name from under the sky.”

[34:16]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “the face of the Lord [is] against the doers of evil to cut off from the earth memory of them.”

[13:8]  ²⁰ tn The word h!nn@h indicates becoming aware of something and has been translated here as a verb.

[13:8]  ²¹ tn Or “I challenge you.” The phrase “I am against you” may be a formula for challenging someone to combat or a duel. See D. I. Block, Ezekiel (NICOT), 1:201-2, and P. Humbert, “Die Herausforderungsformel ‘h!nn#n' ?l?K>,’” ZAW 45 (1933): 101-8.

[13:20]  ²² tn The word הִנֵּה (hinneh, traditionally “behold”) indicates becoming aware of something and has been translated here as a verb.

[13:20]  ²³ tn Heb “human lives” or “souls.”

[15:7]  ²⁴ tn The word translated “set” is the same Hebrew word translated as “provide” in the previous verse.

[15:7]  ²⁵ sn This escape refers to the exile of Ezekiel and others in 597 b.c. (Ezek 1:2; 2 Kgs 24:10-16).

[3:12]  ²⁶ sn See note on “wind” in 2:2.

[3:12]  ²⁷ tc This translation accepts the emendation suggested in BHS of בְּרוּם (bÿrum) for בָּרוּךְ (barukh). The letters mem (מ) and kaph (כ) were easily confused in the old script while בָּרוּךְ (“blessed be”) both implies a quotation which is out of place here and also does not fit the later phrase, “from its place,” which requires a verb of motion.