Yesaya 1:23

1:23 Your officials are rebels, ¹ 

they associate with ²  thieves.

All of them love bribery,

and look for ³  payoffs. ⁴ 

They do not take up the cause of the orphan, ⁵ 

or defend the rights of the widow. ⁶ 

Nehemia 9:34

9:34 Our kings, our leaders, our priests, and our ancestors have not kept your law. They have not paid attention to your commandments or your testimonies by which you have solemnly admonished them.

Yeremia 5:5

5:5 I will go to the leaders ⁷ 

and speak with them.

Surely they know what the Lord demands. ⁸ 

Surely they know what their God requires of them.” ⁹ 

Yet all of them, too, have rejected his authority

and refuse to submit to him. ¹⁰ 

Yeremia 5:31

5:31 The prophets prophesy lies.

The priests exercise power by their own authority. ¹¹ 

And my people love to have it this way.

But they will not be able to help you when the time of judgment comes! ¹² 

Daniel 9:8-11

9:8 O LORD, we have been humiliated ¹³  – our kings, our leaders, and our ancestors – because we have sinned against you. 9:9 Yet the Lord our God is compassionate and forgiving, ¹⁴  even though we have rebelled against him. 9:10 We have not obeyed ¹⁵  the LORD our God by living according to ¹⁶  his laws ¹⁷  that he set before us through his servants the prophets.

9:11 “All Israel has broken ¹⁸  your law and turned away by not obeying you. ¹⁹  Therefore you have poured out on us the judgment solemnly threatened ²⁰  in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against you. ²¹ 

Zefanya 3:1-4

Jerusalem is Corrupt

3:1 The filthy, ²²  stained city is as good as dead;

the city filled with oppressors is finished! ²³ 

3:2 She is disobedient; ²⁴ 

she refuses correction. ²⁵ 

She does not trust the Lord;

she does not seek the advice of ²⁶  her God.

3:3 Her princes ²⁷  are as fierce as roaring lions; ²⁸ 

her rulers ²⁹  are as hungry as wolves in the desert, ³⁰ 

who completely devour their prey by morning. ³¹ 

3:4 Her prophets are proud; ³² 

they are deceitful men.

Her priests defile what is holy; ³³ 

they break God’s laws. ³⁴ 

[1:23]  ¹ tn Or “stubborn”; CEV “have rejected me.”

[1:23]  ² tn Heb “and companions of” (so KJV, NASB); CEV “friends of crooks.”

[1:23]  ³ tn Heb “pursue”; NIV “chase after gifts.”

[1:23]  ⁴ sn Isaiah may have chosen the word for gifts (שַׁלְמוֹנִים, shalmonim; a hapax legomena here), as a sarcastic pun on what these rulers should have been doing. Instead of attending to peace and wholeness (שָׁלוֹם, shalom), they sought after payoffs (שַׁלְמוֹנִים).

[1:23]  ⁵ sn See the note at v. 17.

[1:23]  ⁶ sn The rich oppressors referred to in Isaiah and the other eighth century prophets were not rich capitalists in the modern sense of the word. They were members of the royal military and judicial bureaucracies in Israel and Judah. As these bureaucracies grew, they acquired more and more land and gradually commandeered the economy and legal system. At various administrative levels bribery and graft become commonplace. The common people outside the urban administrative centers were vulnerable to exploitation in such a system, especially those, like widows and orphans, who had lost their family provider through death. Through confiscatory taxation, conscription, excessive interest rates, and other oppressive governmental measures and policies, they were gradually disenfranchised and lost their landed property, and with it, their rights as citizens. The socio-economic equilibrium envisioned in the law of Moses was radically disturbed.

[5:5]  ⁷ tn Or “people in power”; Heb “the great ones.”

[5:5]  ⁸ tn Heb “the way of the Lord.”

[5:5]  ⁹ tn Heb “the judgment [or ordinance] of their God.”

[5:5]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “have broken the yoke and torn off the yoke ropes.” Compare Jer 2:20 and the note there.

[5:31]  ¹¹ tn Heb “they shall rule at their hands.” Since the word “hand” can be used figuratively for authority or mean “side” and the pronoun “them” can refer to the priests themselves or the prophets, the following translations have also been suggested: “the priests rule under their [the prophets’] directions,” or “the priests rule in league with them [the prophets].” From the rest of the book it would appear that the prophets did not exercise authority over the priests nor did they exercise the same authority over the people that the priests did. Hence it probably mean “by their own hand/power/authority.”

[5:31]  ¹² tn Heb “But what will you do at its end?” The rhetorical question implies a negative answer: “Nothing!”

[9:8]  ¹³ tn Heb “to us (belongs) shame of face.”

[9:9]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “to the Lord our God (belong) compassion and forgiveness.”

[9:10]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “paid attention to the voice of,” which is an idiomatic expression for obedience (cf. NASB “nor have we obeyed the voice of”).

[9:10]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “to walk in.”

[9:10]  ¹⁷ tc The LXX and Vulgate have the singular.

[9:11]  ¹⁸ tn Or “transgressed.” The Hebrew verb has the primary sense of crossing a boundary, in this case, God’s law.

[9:11]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “by not paying attention to your voice.”

[9:11]  ²⁰ tn Heb “the curse and the oath which is written.” The term “curse” refers here to the judgments threatened in the Mosaic law (see Deut 28) for rebellion. The expression “the curse and the oath” is probably a hendiadys (cf. Num 5:21; Neh 10:29) referring to the fact that the covenant with its threatened judgments was ratified by solemn oath and made legally binding upon the covenant community.

[9:11]  ²¹ tn Heb “him.”

[3:1]  ²² tn The present translation assumes מֹרְאָה (mor’ah) is derived from רֹאִי (ro’i,“excrement”; see Jastrow 1436 s.v. רֳאִי). The following participle, “stained,” supports this interpretation (cf. NEB “filthy and foul”; NRSV “soiled, defiled”). Another option is to derive the form from מָרָה (marah, “to rebel”); in this case the term should be translated “rebellious” (cf. NASB, NIV “rebellious and defiled”). This idea is supported by v. 2. For discussion of the two options, see HALOT 630 s.v. I מרא and J. J. M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (OTL), 206.

[3:1]  ²³ tn Heb “Woe, soiled and stained one, oppressive city.” The verb “is finished” is supplied in the second line. On the Hebrew word הוֹי (hoy, “ah, woe”), see the note on the word “dead” in 2:5.

[3:1]  sn The following verses show that Jerusalem, personified as a woman (“she”), is the referent.

[3:2]  ²⁴ tn Heb “she does not hear a voice” Refusing to listen is equated with disobedience.

[3:2]  ²⁵ tn Heb “she does not receive correction.” The Hebrew phrase, when negated, refers elsewhere to rejecting verbal advice (Jer 17:23; 32:33; 35:13) and refusing to learn from experience (Jer 2:30; 5:3).

[3:2]  ²⁶ tn Heb “draw near to.” The present translation assumes that the expression “draw near to” refers to seeking God’s will (see 1 Sam 14:36).

[3:3]  ²⁷ tn Or “officials.”

[3:3]  ²⁸ tn Heb “her princes in her midst are roaring lions.” The metaphor has been translated as a simile (“as fierce as”) for clarity.

[3:3]  ²⁹ tn Traditionally “judges.”

[3:3]  ³⁰ tn Heb “her judges [are] wolves of the evening,” that is, wolves that prowl at night. The translation assumes an emendation to עֲרָבָה (’aravah, “desert”). For a discussion of this and other options, see Adele Berlin, Zephaniah (AB 25A), 128. The metaphor has been translated as a simile (“as hungry as”) for clarity.

[3:3]  ³¹ tn Heb “they do not gnaw [a bone] at morning.” The precise meaning of the line is unclear. The statement may mean these wolves devour their prey so completely that not even a bone is left to gnaw by the time morning arrives. For a discussion of this and other options, see Adele Berlin, Zephaniah (AB 25A), 129.

[3:4]  ³² sn Applied to prophets, the word פֹּחֲזִים (pokhazim, “proud”) probably refers to their audacity in passing off their own words as genuine prophecies from the Lord (see Jer 23:32).

[3:4]  ³³ tn Or “defile the temple.”

[3:4]  sn These priests defile what is holy by not observing the proper distinctions between what is ritually clean and unclean (see Ezek 22:26).

[3:4]  ³⁴ tn Heb “they treat violently [the] law.”