Psalms 42:3

42:3 I cannot eat, I weep day and night; ¹ 

all day long they say to me, ²  “Where is your God?”

Psalms 42:10

42:10 My enemies’ taunts cut into me to the bone, ³ 

as they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” ⁴ 

Psalms 79:10

79:10 Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”

Before our very eyes may the shed blood of your servants

be avenged among the nations! ⁵ 

Exodus 32:12

32:12 Why ⁶  should the Egyptians say, ⁷  ‘For evil ⁸  he led them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy ⁹  them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger, and relent ¹⁰  of this evil against your people.

Numbers 14:15-16

14:15 If you kill ¹¹  this entire people at once, ¹²  then the nations that have heard of your fame will say, 14:16 ‘Because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land that he swore to them, he killed them in the wilderness.’

Deuteronomy 32:26-27

The Weakness of Other Gods

32:26 “I said, ‘I want to cut them in pieces. ¹³ 

I want to make people forget they ever existed.

32:27 But I fear the reaction ¹⁴  of their enemies,

for ¹⁵  their adversaries would misunderstand

and say, “Our power is great, ¹⁶ 

and the Lord has not done all this!”’

Deuteronomy 32:2

32:2 My teaching will drop like the rain,

my sayings will drip like the dew, ¹⁷ 

as rain drops upon the grass,

and showers upon new growth.

Deuteronomy 19:10-19

19:10 You must not shed innocent blood ¹⁸  in your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, for that would make you guilty. ¹⁹  19:11 However, suppose a person hates someone else ²⁰  and stalks him, attacks him, kills him, ²¹  and then flees to one of these cities. 19:12 The elders of his own city must send for him and remove him from there to deliver him over to the blood avenger ²²  to die. 19:13 You must not pity him, but purge out the blood of the innocent ²³  from Israel, so that it may go well with you.

Laws Concerning Witnesses

19:14 You must not encroach on your neighbor’s property, ²⁴  which will have been defined ²⁵  in the inheritance you will obtain in the land the Lord your God is giving you. ²⁶ 

19:15 A single witness may not testify ²⁷  against another person for any trespass or sin that he commits. A matter may be legally established ²⁸  only on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 19:16 If a false ²⁹  witness testifies against another person and accuses him of a crime, ³⁰  19:17 then both parties to the controversy must stand before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges ³¹  who will be in office in those days. 19:18 The judges will thoroughly investigate the matter, and if the witness should prove to be false and to have given false testimony against the accused, ³²  19:19 you must do to him what he had intended to do to the accused. In this way you will purge ³³  evil from among you.

Joel 2:17

2:17 Let the priests, those who serve the Lord, weep

from the vestibule all the way back to the altar. ³⁴ 

Let them say, “Have pity, O Lord, on your people;

please do not turn over your inheritance to be mocked,

to become a proverb ³⁵  among the nations.

Why should it be said ³⁶  among the peoples,

“Where is their God?”

[42:3]  ¹ tn Heb “My tears have become my food day and night.”

[42:3]  ² tn Heb “when [they] say to me all the day.” The suffixed third masculine plural pronoun may have been accidentally omitted from the infinitive בֶּאֱמֹר (be’ÿmor, “when [they] say”). Note the term בְּאָמְרָם (bÿ’omram, “when they say”) in v. 10.

[42:10]  ³ tc Heb “with a shattering in my bones my enemies taunt me.” A few medieval Hebrew mss and Symmachus’ Greek version read “like” instead of “with.”

[42:10]  ⁴ sn “Where is your God?” The enemies ask this same question in v. 3.

[79:10]  ⁵ tn Heb “may it be known among the nations, to our eyes, the vengeance of the shed blood of your servants.”

[32:12]  ⁶ tn The question is rhetorical; it really forms an affirmation that is used here as a reason for the request (see GKC 474 §150.e).

[32:12]  ⁷ tn Heb “speak, saying.” This is redundant in English and has been simplified in the translation.

[32:12]  ⁸ tn The word “evil” means any kind of life-threatening or fatal calamity. “Evil” is that which hinders life, interrupts life, causes pain to life, or destroys it. The Egyptians would conclude that such a God would have no good intent in taking his people to the desert if now he destroyed them.

[32:12]  ⁹ tn The form is a Piel infinitive construct from כָּלָה (kalah, “to complete, finish”) but in this stem, “bring to an end, destroy.” As a purpose infinitive this expresses what the Egyptians would have thought of God’s motive.

[32:12]  ¹⁰ tn The verb “repent, relent” when used of God is certainly an anthropomorphism. It expresses the deep pain that one would have over a situation. Earlier God repented that he had made humans (Gen 6:6). Here Moses is asking God to repent/relent over the judgment he was about to bring, meaning that he should be moved by such compassion that there would be no judgment like that. J. P. Hyatt observes that the Bible uses so many anthropomorphisms because the Israelites conceived of God as a dynamic and living person in a vital relationship with people, responding to their needs and attitudes and actions (Exodus [NCBC], 307). See H. V. D. Parunak, “A Semantic Survey of NHM,” Bib 56 (1975): 512-32.

[14:15]  ¹¹ tn The verb is the Hiphil perfect of מוּת (mut), וְהֵמַתָּה (vÿhemattah). The vav (ו) consecutive makes this also a future time sequence verb, but again in a conditional clause.

[14:15]  ¹² tn Heb “as one man.”

[32:26]  ¹³ tc The LXX reads “I said I would scatter them.” This reading is followed by a number of English versions (e.g., KJV, ASV, NIV, NCV, NRSV, NLT, CEV).

[32:27]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “anger.”

[32:27]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “lest.”

[32:27]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “Our hand is high.” Cf. NAB “Our own hand won the victory.”

[32:2]  ¹⁷ tn Or “mist,” “light drizzle.” In some contexts the term appears to refer to light rain, rather than dew.

[19:10]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “innocent blood must not be shed.” The Hebrew phrase דָּם נָקִי (dam naqiy) means the blood of a person to whom no culpability or responsibility adheres because what he did was without malice aforethought (HALOT 224 s.v דָּם 4.b).

[19:10]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “and blood will be upon you” (cf. KJV, ASV); NRSV “thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you.”

[19:11]  ²⁰ tn Heb “his neighbor.”

[19:11]  ²¹ tn Heb “rises against him and strikes him fatally.”

[19:12]  ²² tn The גֹאֵל הַדָּם (go’el haddam, “avenger of blood”) would ordinarily be a member of the victim’s family who, after due process of law, was invited to initiate the process of execution (cf. Num 35:16-28). See R. Hubbard, NIDOTTE 1:789-94.

[19:13]  ²³ sn Purge out the blood of the innocent. Because of the corporate nature of Israel’s community life, the whole community shared in the guilt of unavenged murder unless and until vengeance occurred. Only this would restore spiritual and moral equilibrium (Num 35:33).

[19:14]  ²⁴ tn Heb “border.” Cf. NRSV “You must not move your neighbor’s boundary marker.”

[19:14]  ²⁵ tn Heb “which they set off from the beginning.”

[19:14]  ²⁶ tn The Hebrew text includes “to possess it.” This phrase has been left untranslated to avoid redundancy.

[19:15]  ²⁷ tn Heb “rise up” (likewise in v. 16).

[19:15]  ²⁸ tn Heb “may stand.”

[19:16]  ²⁹ tn Heb “violent” (חָמָס, khamas). This is a witness whose motivation from the beginning is to do harm to the accused and who, therefore, resorts to calumny and deceit. See I. Swart and C. VanDam, NIDOTTE 2:177-80.

[19:16]  ³⁰ tn Or “rebellion.” Rebellion against God’s law is in view (cf. NAB “of a defection from the law”).

[19:17]  ³¹ tn The appositional construction (“before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges”) indicates that these human agents represented the Lord himself, that is, they stood in his place (cf. Deut 16:18-20; 17:8-9).

[19:18]  ³² tn Heb “his brother” (also in the following verse).

[19:19]  ³³ tn Heb “you will burn out” (בִּעַרְתָּ, bi’arta). Like a cancer, unavenged sin would infect the whole community. It must, therefore, be excised by the purging out of its perpetrators who, presumably, remained unrepentant (cf. Deut 13:6; 17:7, 12; 21:21; 22:21-22, 24; 24:7).

[2:17]  ³⁴ tn Heb “between the vestibule and the altar.” The vestibule was located at the entrance of the temple and the altar was located at the other end of the building. So “between the vestibule and the altar” is a merism referring to the entire structure. The priestly lament permeates the entire house of worship.

[2:17]  ³⁵ tn For the MT reading לִמְשָׁל (limshol, an infinitive, “to rule”), one should instead read לְמָשָׁל (lÿmashal, a noun, “to a byword”). While the consonantal Hebrew text permits either, the context suggests that the concern here is more one of not wanting to appear abandoned by God to ongoing economic depression rather than one of concern over potential political subjection of Israel (cf. v. 19). The possibility that the form in the MT is an infinitive construct of the denominative verb II מָשַׁל (mashal, “to utter a proverb”) does not seem likely because of the following preposition (Hebrew בְּ [bÿ], rather than עַל [’al]).

[2:17]  ³⁶ tn Heb “Why will they say?”