Yeremia 9:13

9:13 The Lord answered, “This has happened because these people have rejected my laws which I gave them. They have not obeyed me or followed those laws. ¹ 

Yeremia 26:4

26:4 Tell them that the Lord says, ²  ‘You must obey me! You must live according to the way I have instructed you in my laws. ³ 

Yeremia 29:11

29:11 For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the Lord. ⁴  ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you ⁵  a future filled with hope. ⁶ 

Yeremia 44:10

44:10 To this day your people ⁷  have shown no contrition! They have not revered me nor followed the laws and statutes I commanded ⁸  you and your ancestors.’

[9:13]  ¹ tn Heb “and they have not walked in it (with “it” referring to “my law”).

[26:4]  ² tn Heb “thus says the Lord, ‘…’.” The use of the indirect quotation in the translation eliminates one level of embedded quotation to avoid confusion.

[26:4]  ³ tn Heb “by walking in my law which I set before you.”

[26:4]  sn Examples of those laws are found in Jer 7:5-6, 9. The law was summarized or epitomized in the ten commandments which are called the “words of the covenant” in Exod 34:28, but it contained much more. However, when Israel is taken to task by God, it often relates to their failure to live up to the standards of the ten commandments (Heb “the ten words”; see Hos 4:1-3; Jer 7:9).

[29:11]  ⁴ tn Heb “Oracle of the Lord.”

[29:11]  ⁵ tn Heb “I know the plans that I am planning for you, oracle of the Lord, plans of well-being and not for harm to give to you….”

[29:11]  ⁶ tn Or “the future you hope for”; Heb “a future and a hope.” This is a good example of hendiadys where two formally coordinated nouns (adjectives, verbs) convey a single idea where one of the terms functions as a qualifier of the other. For this figure see E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech, 658-72. This example is discussed on p. 661.

[44:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “they” but as H. Freedman (Jeremiah [SoBB], 284) notes the third person is used here to include the people just referred to as well as the current addressees. Hence “your people” or “the people of Judah.” It is possible that the third person again reflects the rhetorical distancing that was referred to earlier in 35:16 (see the translator’s note there for explanation) in which case one might translate “you have shown,” and “you have not revered.”

[44:10]  ⁸ tn Heb “to set before.” According to BDB 817 s.v. פָּנֶה II.4.b(g) this refers to “propounding to someone for acceptance or choice.” This is clearly the usage in Deut 30:15, 19; Jer 21:8 and is likely the case here. However, to translate literally would not be good English idiom and “proposed to” might not be correctly understood, so the basic translation of נָתַן (natan) has been used here.