Yehezkiel 7:11-12

7:11 Violence ¹  has grown into a staff that supports wickedness. Not one of them will be left ²  – not from their crowd, not from their wealth, not from their prominence. ³  7:12 The time has come; the day has struck! The customer should not rejoice, nor the seller mourn; for divine wrath ⁴  comes against their whole crowd.

Yesaya 24:1-7

The Lord Will Judge the Earth

24:1 Look, the Lord is ready to devastate the earth

and leave it in ruins;

he will mar its surface

and scatter its inhabitants.

24:2 Everyone will suffer – the priest as well as the people, ⁵ 

the master as well as the servant, ⁶ 

the elegant lady as well as the female attendant, ⁷ 

the seller as well as the buyer, ⁸ 

the borrower as well as the lender, ⁹ 

the creditor as well as the debtor. ¹⁰ 

24:3 The earth will be completely devastated

and thoroughly ransacked.

For the Lord has decreed this judgment. ¹¹ 

24:4 The earth ¹²  dries up ¹³  and withers,

the world shrivels up and withers;

the prominent people of the earth ¹⁴  fade away.

24:5 The earth is defiled by ¹⁵  its inhabitants, ¹⁶ 

for they have violated laws,

disregarded the regulation, ¹⁷ 

and broken the permanent treaty. ¹⁸ 

24:6 So a treaty curse ¹⁹  devours the earth;

its inhabitants pay for their guilt. ²⁰ 

This is why the inhabitants of the earth disappear, ²¹ 

and are reduced to just a handful of people. ²² 

24:7 The new wine dries up,

the vines shrivel up,

all those who like to celebrate ²³  groan.

Yeremia 6:11

6:11 I am as full of anger as you are, Lord, ²⁴ 

I am tired of trying to hold it in.”

The Lord answered, ²⁵ 

“Vent it, then, ²⁶  on the children who play in the street

and on the young men who are gathered together.

Husbands and wives are to be included, ²⁷ 

as well as the old and those who are advanced in years.

Yeremia 7:20

7:20 So,” the Lord God ²⁸  says, “my raging fury will be poured out on this land. ²⁹  It will be poured out on human beings and animals, on trees and crops. ³⁰  And it will burn like a fire which cannot be extinguished.”

Yeremia 12:12

12:12 A destructive army ³¹  will come marching

over the hilltops in the desert.

For the Lord will use them as his destructive weapon ³² 

against ³³  everyone from one end of the land to the other.

No one will be safe. ³⁴ 

[7:11]  ¹ tn Heb “the violence.”

[7:11]  ² tc The LXX reads “he will crush the wicked rod without confusion or haste.”

[7:11]  tn The verb has been supplied for the Hebrew text to clarify the sense.

[7:11]  ³ tn The Hebrew word occurs only here in the OT.

[7:12]  ⁴ tn Heb “wrath.” Context clarifies that God’s wrath is in view.

[24:2]  ⁵ tn Heb “and it will be like the people, like the priest.”

[24:2]  ⁶ tn Heb “like the servant, like his master.”

[24:2]  ⁷ tn Heb “like the female servant, like her mistress.”

[24:2]  ⁸ tn Heb “like the buyer, like the seller.”

[24:2]  ⁹ tn Heb “like the lender, like the borrower.”

[24:2]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “like the creditor, just as the one to whom he lends.”

[24:3]  ¹¹ tn Heb “for the Lord has spoken this word.”

[24:4]  ¹² tn Some prefer to read “land” here, but the word pair אֶרֶץ/תֵּבֵל (erets/tevel [see the corresponding term in the parallel line]) elsewhere clearly designates the earth/world (see 1 Sam 2:8; 1 Chr 16:30; Job 37;12; Pss 19:4; 24:1; 33:8; 89:11; 90:2; 96:13; 98:9; Prov 8:26, 31; Isa 14:16-17; 34:1; Jer 10:12; 51:15; Lam 4:12). According to L. Stadelmann, תבל designates “the habitable part of the world” (The Hebrew Conception of the World [AnBib], 130).

[24:4]  ¹³ tn Or “mourns” (BDB 5 s.v. אָבַל). HALOT 6-7 lists the homonyms I אבל (“mourn”) and II אבל (“dry up”). They propose the second here on the basis of parallelism.

[24:4]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “the height of the people of the earth.” The translation assumes an emendation of the singular form מְרוֹם (mÿrom, “height of”) to the plural construct מְרֹמֵי (mÿrome, “high ones of”; note the plural verb at the beginning of the line), and understands the latter as referring to the prominent people of human society.

[24:5]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “beneath”; cf. KJV, ASV, NRSV “under”; NAB “because of.”

[24:5]  ¹⁶ sn Isa 26:21 suggests that the earth’s inhabitants defiled the earth by shedding the blood of their fellow human beings. See also Num 35:33-34, which assumes that bloodshed defiles a land.

[24:5]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “moved past [the?] regulation.”

[24:5]  ¹⁸ tn Or “everlasting covenant” (KJV, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT); NAB “the ancient covenant”; CEV “their agreement that was to last forever.”

[24:5]  sn For a lengthy discussion of the identity of this covenant/treaty, see R. Chisholm, “The ‘Everlasting Covenant’ and the ‘City of Chaos’: Intentional Ambiguity and Irony in Isaiah 24,” CTR 6 (1993): 237-53. In this context, where judgment comes upon both the pagan nations and God’s covenant community, the phrase “permanent treaty” is intentionally ambiguous. For the nations this treaty is the Noahic mandate of Gen 9:1-7 with its specific stipulations and central regulation (Gen 9:7). By shedding blood, the warlike nations violated this treaty, which promotes population growth and prohibits murder. For Israel, which was also guilty of bloodshed (see Isa 1:15, 21; 4:4), this “permanent treaty” would refer more specifically to the Mosaic Law and its regulations prohibiting murder (Exod 20:13; Num 35:6-34), which are an extension of the Noahic mandate.

[24:6]  ¹⁹ sn Ancient Near Eastern treaties often had “curses,” or threatened judgments, attached to them. (See Deut 28 for a biblical example of such curses.) The party or parties taking an oath of allegiance acknowledged that disobedience would activate these curses, which typically threatened loss of agricultural fertility as depicted in the following verses.

[24:6]  ²⁰ tn The verb אָשַׁם (’asham, “be guilty”) is here used metonymically to mean “pay, suffer for one’s guilt” (see HALOT 95 s.v. אשׁם).

[24:6]  ²¹ tn BDB 359 s.v. חָרַר derives the verb חָרוּ (kharu) from חָרַר (kharar, “burn”), but HALOT 351 s.v. II חרה understands a hapax legomenon חָרָה (kharah, “to diminish in number,” a homonym of חָרָה) here, relating it to an alleged Arabic cognate meaning “to decrease.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsa^a has חורו, perhaps understanding the root as חָוַר (khavar, “grow pale”; see Isa 29:22 and HALOT 299 s.v. I חור).

[24:6]  ²² tn Heb “and mankind is left small [in number].”

[24:7]  ²³ tn The Hebrew text reads literally, “all the joyful in heart,” but the context specifies the context as parties and drinking bouts.

[6:11]  ²⁴ tn Heb “I am full of the wrath of the Lord.”

[6:11]  ²⁵ tn These words are not in the text but are implicit from the words that follow. They are supplied in the translation for clarity.

[6:11]  ²⁶ tn Heb “Pour it out.”

[6:11]  ²⁷ tn Heb “are to be captured.”

[7:20]  ²⁸ tn Heb “Lord Yahweh.” The translation follows the ancient Jewish tradition of substituting the Hebrew word for God for the proper name Yahweh.

[7:20]  ²⁹ tn Heb “this place.” Some see this as a reference to the temple but the context has been talking about what goes on in the towns of Judah and Jerusalem and the words that follow, meant as a further explanation, are applied to the whole land.

[7:20]  ³⁰ tn Heb “the trees of/in the field and the fruit of/in the ground.”

[12:12]  ³¹ tn Heb “destroyers.”

[12:12]  ³² tn Heb “It is the Lord’s consuming sword.”

[12:12]  ³³ tn Heb “For a sword of the Lord will devour.” The sword is often symbolic for destructive forces of all kinds. Here and in Isa 34:6; Jer 47:6 it is symbolic of the enemy armies that the Lord uses to carry out destructive punishment against his enemies, hence the translation “his destructive weapon.” A similar figure is use in Isa 10:5 where the figure is more clearly identified; Assyria is the rod/club that the Lord will use to discipline unfaithful Israel.

[12:12]  ³⁴ tn Heb “There is no peace to all flesh.”