The Masoretic Text allows for the perception that God has been forced into idle passivity, though it is worth repeating that this is hardly the picture that the Hebrew text requires of its reader’s mind. The actual intention of the Masoretic Text 59.2 seems much closer to a recent description of Hosea 5.15, a verse that has the Lord returning to his place until Ephraim and Judah acknowledge their guilt and seek his face... The Septuagint removes any suggestion that sin has the power to turn the divine face. It also transforms a divine deafness that sin has imposed upon God into an implicit divine decision not to show mercy... In the Greek text, God has become an active judge rather than a passive deity who suffers alienation from his people because of sin’s active force upon him. The translator accomplishes this by converting the people’s sins to the occasion of God’s judicial turning by means of the inserted preposition διά. This allows him to make God the subject of ἀπέστρεψεν (now singularized), a verb that has now become one member of a stock phrase for divine judicial turning.