Job 27:15

Hebrew Bible

13 This is the portion of the wicked man allotted by God, the inheritance that evildoers receive from the Almighty. 14 If his children increase—it is for the sword! His offspring never have enough to eat. 15 Those who survive him are buried by the plague, and their widows do not mourn for them. 16 If he piles up silver like dust and stores up clothing like mounds of clay, 17 what he stores up a righteous man will wear, and an innocent man will inherit his silver.

Ezekiel 6:12

Hebrew Bible

10 They will know that I am the Lord; my threats to bring this catastrophe on them were not empty. 11 “‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Clap your hands, stamp your feet, and say, “Ah!” because of all the evil, abominable practices of the house of Israel, for they will fall by the sword, famine, and pestilence. 12 The one far away will die by pestilence, the one close by will fall by the sword, and whoever is left and has escaped these will die by famine. I will fully vent my rage against them. 13 Then you will know that I am the Lord when their dead lie among their idols around their altars, on every high hill and on all the mountaintops, under every green tree and every leafy oak—the places where they have offered fragrant incense to all their idols. 14 I will stretch out my hand against them and make the land a desolate waste from the wilderness to Riblah, in all the places where they live. Then they will know that I am the Lord.’”

 Notes and References

"... Here the Israelite deity’s words are remembered. All the unfaithful Israelites were appointed to die in the wilderness over a broad period of time, and this is in fact what happened and is being recounted. Each of them “met an untimely demise” in the wilderness. They were not put to death in any formal or immediate way. This same notion could fit what is found in Gen 2:17 and 3:4. We find the idiom used in reference to eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ... There has always been debate regarding what the nature of the death warned against here would be, and it is not important to establish this here. Rather, had ‘θανάτῳ + θανατόω’ been used, a formal death penalty would have been envisaged, which, ostensibly, would mean the primeval couple would need to be killed forthrightly. We know the text does not include such a killing, and so it is fitting that the translator can leave open the timing and nature of this ‘death’ with the idiom. Outside the Pentateuch, “θανάτῳ + τελευτάω” occurs twice in the Septuagint ... Job 27:15; Ezekiel 6:12 ... While these books are largely regarded to be later translations than the LXX Pentateuch and could therefore be influenced by this earlier work, it is still valuable to mention them. This is because the translators have both chosen to use a translation of Hebrew texts that do not isomorphically conform to such a rendering ..."

Korytko, Joel Death of the Covenant Code: Evaluating the Translation of Laws with Capital Punishment in Old Greek Exodus 21:1–23:19 in Light of Graeco-Egyptian Law (pp. 68-69) Northwest Seminary and College, 2022

 User Comments

Do you have questions or comments about these texts? Please submit them here.