Yesaya 42:24-25

42:24 Who handed Jacob over to the robber?

Who handed Israel over to the looters? ¹ 

Was it not the Lord, against whom we sinned?

They refused to follow his commands;

they disobeyed his law. ² 

42:25 So he poured out his fierce anger on them,

along with the devastation ³  of war.

Its flames encircled them, but they did not realize it; ⁴ 

it burned against them, but they did notice. ⁵ 

Ulangan 28:15-20

Curses as Reversal of Blessings

28:15 “But if you ignore ⁶  the Lord your God and are not careful to keep all his commandments and statutes I am giving you today, then all these curses will come upon you in full force: ⁷  28:16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. 28:17 Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed. 28:18 Your children ⁸  will be cursed, as well as the produce of your soil, the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks. 28:19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. ⁹ 

Curses by Disease and Drought

28:20 “The Lord will send on you a curse, confusing you and opposing you ¹⁰  in everything you undertake ¹¹  until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the evil of your deeds, in that you have forsaken me. ¹² 

Ulangan 29:22-28

29:22 The generation to come – your descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the foreigner who will come from distant places – will see ¹³  the afflictions of that land and the illnesses that the Lord has brought on it. 29:23 The whole land will be covered with brimstone, salt, and burning debris; it will not be planted nor will it sprout or produce grass. It will resemble the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord destroyed in his intense anger. ¹⁴  29:24 Then all the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord done all this to this land? What is this fierce, heated display of anger ¹⁵  all about?” 29:25 Then people will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. 29:26 They went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods they did not know and that he did not permit them to worship. ¹⁶  29:27 That is why the Lord’s anger erupted against this land, bringing on it all the curses ¹⁷  written in this scroll. 29:28 So the Lord has uprooted them from their land in anger, wrath, and great rage and has deported them to another land, as is clear today.”

Ulangan 30:18-19

30:18 I declare to you this very day that you will certainly ¹⁸  perish! You will not extend your time in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess. ¹⁹  30:19 Today I invoke heaven and earth as a witness against you that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!

Yosua 23:15-16

23:15 But in the same way every faithful promise the Lord your God made to you has been realized, ²⁰  it is just as certain, if you disobey, that the Lord will bring on you every judgment ²¹  until he destroys you from this good land which the Lord your God gave you. 23:16 If you violate the covenantal laws of the Lord your God which he commanded you to keep, ²²  and follow, worship, and bow down to other gods, ²³  the Lord will be very angry with you and you will disappear ²⁴  quickly from the good land which he gave to you.”

Zakharia 5:3-4

5:3 The speaker went on to say, “This is a curse ²⁵  traveling across the whole earth. For example, according to the curse whoever steals ²⁶  will be removed from the community; or on the other hand (according to the curse) whoever swears falsely will suffer the same fate.” 5:4 “I will send it out,” says the Lord who rules over all, “and it will enter the house of the thief and of the person who swears falsely in my name. It will land in the middle of his house and destroy both timber and stones.”

Maleakhi 2:2

2:2 If you do not listen and take seriously ²⁷  the need to honor my name,” says the Lord who rules over all, “I will send judgment ²⁸  on you and turn your blessings into curses – indeed, I have already done so because you are not taking it to heart.

Maleakhi 3:9

3:9 You are bound for judgment ²⁹  because you are robbing me – this whole nation is guilty. ³⁰ 

Maleakhi 4:1

4:1 (3:19) ³¹  “For indeed the day ³²  is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant evildoers will be chaff. The coming day will burn them up,” says the Lord who rules over all. “It ³³  will not leave even a root or branch.

Maleakhi 4:6

4:6 He will encourage fathers and their children to return to me, ³⁴  so that I will not come and strike the earth with judgment.” ³⁵ 

Matius 27:25

27:25 In ³⁶  reply all the people said, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!”

[42:24]  ¹ tn Heb “Who gave to the robber Jacob, and Israel to the looters?” In the first line the consonantal text (Kethib) has מְשׁוֹסֶה (mÿshoseh), a Polel participle from שָׁסָה (shasah, “plunder”). The marginal reading (Qere) is מְשִׁיסָּה (mÿshissah), a noun meaning “plunder.” In this case one could translate “Who handed Jacob over as plunder?”

[42:24]  ² tn Heb “they were not willing in his ways to walk, and they did not listen to his law.”

[42:25]  ³ tn Heb “strength” (so KJV, NASB); NAB “fury”; NASB “fierceness”; NIV “violence.”

[42:25]  ⁴ tn Heb “and it blazed against him all around, but he did not know.” The subject of the third feminine singular verb “blazed” is the divine חֵמָה (khemah, “anger”) mentioned in the previous line.

[42:25]  ⁵ tn Heb “and it burned against him, but he did not set [it] upon [the] heart.”

[28:15]  ⁶ tn Heb “do not hear the voice of.”

[28:15]  ⁷ tn Heb “and overtake you” (so NIV, NRSV); NAB, NLT “and overwhelm you.”

[28:18]  ⁸ tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NIV, NRSV).

[28:19]  ⁹ sn See note on the similar expression in v. 6.

[28:20]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “the curse, the confusion, and the rebuke” (NASB and NIV similar); NRSV “disaster, panic, and frustration.”

[28:20]  ¹¹ tn Heb “in all the stretching out of your hand.”

[28:20]  ¹² tc For the MT first person common singular suffix (“me”), the LXX reads either “Lord” (Lucian) or third person masculine singular suffix (“him”; various codices). The MT’s more difficult reading probably represents the original text.

[28:20]  tn Heb “the evil of your doings wherein you have forsaken me”; CEV “all because you rejected the Lord.”

[29:22]  ¹³ tn Heb “will say and see.” One expects a quotation to appear, but it seems to be omitted. To avoid confusion in the translation, the verb “will say” is omitted.

[29:23]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “the anger and the wrath.” This construction is a hendiadys intended to intensify the emotion.

[29:24]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “this great burning of anger”; KJV “the heat of this great anger.”

[29:26]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “did not assign to them”; NASB, NRSV “had not allotted to them.”

[29:27]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “the entire curse.”

[30:18]  ¹⁸ tn The Hebrew text uses the infinitive absolute for emphasis, which the translation indicates with “certainly.”

[30:18]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “to go there to possess it.”

[23:15]  ²⁰ tn Heb “and it will be as every good word which the Lord your God spoke to you has come to pass.”

[23:15]  ²¹ tn Heb “so the Lord will bring every injurious [or “evil”] word [or “thing”] upon you.”

[23:16]  ²² tn Heb “when you violate the covenant of the Lord your God which he commanded you.”

[23:16]  ²³ tn Heb “and you walk and serve other gods and bow down to them.”

[23:16]  ²⁴ tn Or “perish.”

[5:3]  ²⁵ tn The Hebrew word translated “curse” (אָלָה, ’alah) alludes to the covenant sanctions that attend the violation of God’s covenant with Israel (cf. Deut 29:12, 14, 20-21).

[5:3]  ²⁶ sn Stealing and swearing falsely (mentioned later in this verse) are sins against mankind and God respectively and are thus violations of the two major parts of the Ten Commandments. These two stipulations (commandments 8 and 3) represent the whole law.

[2:2]  ²⁷ tn Heb “and if you do not place upon [the] heart”; KJV, NAB, NRSV “lay it to heart.”

[2:2]  ²⁸ tn Heb “the curse” (so NASB, NRSV); NLT “a terrible curse.”

[3:9]  ²⁹ tn Heb “cursed with a curse” that is, “under a curse” (so NIV, NLT, CEV).

[3:9]  ³⁰ tn The phrase “is guilty” is not present in the Hebrew text but is implied, and has been supplied in the translation for clarification and stylistic reasons.

[4:1]  ³¹ sn Beginning with 4:1, the verse numbers through 4:6 in the English Bible differ from the verse numbers in the Hebrew text (BHS), with 4:1 ET = 3:19 HT, 4:2 ET = 3:20 HT, etc., through 4:6 ET = 3:24 HT. Thus the book of Malachi in the Hebrew Bible has only three chapters, with 24 verses in ch. 3.

[4:1]  ³² sn This day is the well-known “day of the Lord” so pervasive in OT eschatological texts (see Joel 2:30-31; Amos 5:18; Obad 15). For the believer it is a day of grace and salvation; for the sinner, a day of judgment and destruction.

[4:1]  ³³ tn Heb “so that it” (so NASB, NRSV). For stylistic reasons a new sentence was begun here in the translation.

[4:6]  ³⁴ tn Heb “he will turn the heart[s] of [the] fathers to [the] sons, and the heart[s] of [the] sons to their fathers.” This may mean that the messenger will encourage reconciliation of conflicts within Jewish families in the postexilic community (see Mal 2:10; this interpretation is followed by most English versions). Another option is to translate, “he will turn the hearts of the fathers together with those of the children [to me], and the hearts of the children together with those of their fathers [to me].” In this case the prophet encourages both the younger and older generations of sinful society to repent and return to the Lord (cf. Mal 3:7). This option is preferred in the present translation; see Beth Glazier-McDonald, Malachi (SBLDS), 256.

[4:6]  ³⁵ tn Heb “[the] ban” (חֵרֶם, kherem). God’s prophetic messenger seeks to bring about salvation and restoration, thus avoiding the imposition of the covenant curse, that is, the divine ban that the hopelessly unrepentant must expect (see Deut 7:2; 20:17; Judg 1:21; Zech 14:11). If the wicked repent, the purifying judgment threatened in 4:1-3 will be unnecessary.

[27:25]  ³⁶ tn Grk “answering, all the people said.” This construction is somewhat redundant in English and has been simplified in the translation.