Imamat 26:30

26:30 I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars, ¹  and I will stack your dead bodies on top of the lifeless bodies of your idols. ²  I will abhor you. ³ 

Imamat 26:1

Exhortation to Obedience

26:1 “‘You must not make for yourselves idols, ⁴  so you must not set up for yourselves a carved image or a pillar, and you must not place a sculpted stone in your land to bow down before ⁵  it, for I am the Lord your God.

1 Raja-raja 12:31

12:31 He built temples ⁶  on the high places and appointed as priests people who were not Levites.

[26:30]  ¹ sn Regarding these cultic installations, see the remarks in B. A. Levine, Leviticus (JPSTC), 188, and R. E. Averbeck, NIDOTTE 2:903. The term rendered “incense altars” might better be rendered “sanctuaries [of foreign deities]” or “stelae.”

[26:30]  ² tn The translation reflects the Hebrew wordplay “your corpses…the corpses of your idols.” Since idols, being lifeless, do not really have “corpses,” the translation uses “dead bodies” for people and “lifeless bodies” for the idols.

[26:30]  ³ tn Heb “and my soul will abhor you.”

[26:1]  ⁴ sn For the literature regarding the difficult etymology and meaning of the term for “idols” (אֱלִילִם, ’elilim), see the literature cited in the note on Lev 19:4. It appears to be a diminutive play on words with אֵל (’el, “god, God”) and, perhaps at the same time, recalls a common Semitic word for “worthless, weak, powerless, nothingness.” Snaith suggests a rendering of “worthless godlings.”

[26:1]  ⁵ tn Heb “on.” The “sculpted stone” appears to be some sort of stone with images carved into (see B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 181, and J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 449).

[12:31]  ⁶ tn The Hebrew text has the singular, but the plural is preferable here (see 1 Kgs 13:32). The Old Greek translation and the Vulgate have the plural.