¹ tn Heb “seventy brothers.”

¹ tn Heb “seventy cubits” (36.75 meters).

¹ tn The text simply says “seventy-five feet.”

⁴ sn Concerning the seventy years see Jer 25:11.

⁴ tn Heb “was the son of five years and seventy year[s].”

³ sn Seventy days. This probably refers to a time of national mourning.

² tn Heb “wrote down for him the officials of Succoth and its elders, seventy-seven men.”

⁵ tn Heb “all the days of the desolation it rested to fulfill the seventy years.”

¹ tn Heb “the days of our years, in them [are] seventy years.”

¹ sn See the study note on Jer 25:11 for the reckoning of the seventy years.

² tc See the tc note on the number “seventy-two” in Luke 10:1.

⁴ sn Their council is probably a reference to the Jewish Sanhedrin, the council of seventy leaders.

¹ sn Note the contrast between these seventy men who represented Israel and the seventy elders who ate the covenant meal before God, inaugurating the covenant relationship (Exod 24:1, 9).

¹ tn Heb “and when the letter came to them, they took the sons of the king and slaughtered seventy men.”

⁴ tn Heb “At the end of seventy years it will be for Tyre like the song of the prostitute.”

² sn The number seventy includes Jacob himself and the seventy-one descendants (including Dinah, Joseph, Manasseh, and Ephraim) listed in vv. 8-25, minus Er and Onan (deceased). The LXX gives the number as “seventy-five” (cf. Acts 7:14).

¹ tn The form of the word is the passive participle כְּתֻבִים (kÿtuvim, “written”). It is normally taken to mean “among those registered,” but it is not clear if that means they were to be among the seventy or not. That seems unlikely since there is no mention of the seventy being registered, and vv. 24-25 says all seventy went out and prophesied. The registration may be to eldership, or the role of the officer.

³ sn The seventy years refers to the predicted period of Babylonian exile, a period with flexible beginning and ending points depending on the particular circumstances in view (cf. Jer 25:1; 28:1; 29:10; Dan 9:2). Here the end of the seventy years appears to be marked by the completion of the temple in 516 b.c., exactly seventy years after its destruction in 586.

² tc There is a difficult textual problem here and in v. 17, where the number is either “seventy” (א A C L W Θ Ξ Ψ Ë^1,13 Ï and several church fathers and early versions) or “seventy-two” (Ì⁷⁵ B D 0181 pc lat as well as other versions and fathers). The more difficult reading is “seventy-two,” since scribes would be prone to assimilate this passage to several OT passages that refer to groups of seventy people (Num 11:13-17; Deut 10:22; Judg 8:30; 2 Kgs 10:1 et al.); this reading also has slightly better ms support. “Seventy” could be the preferred reading if scribes drew from the tradition of the number of translators of the LXX, which the Letter of Aristeas puts at seventy-two (TCGNT 127), although this is far less likely. All things considered, “seventy-two” is a much more difficult reading and accounts for the rise of the other. Only Luke notes a second larger mission like the one in 9:1-6.

² tn Heb “fifty cubits.” Assuming a standard length for the cubit of about 18 inches (45 cm), this would be about seventy-five feet (22.5 meters), which is a surprisingly tall height for the gallows. Perhaps the number assumes the gallows was built on a large supporting platform or a natural hill for visual effect, in which case the structure itself may have been considerably smaller. Cf. NCV “a seventy-five foot platform”; CEV “a tower built about seventy-five feet high.”