17:4 He plucked off its topmost shoot;
he brought it to a land of merchants
and planted it in a city of traders.
17:5 He took one of the seedlings 1 of the land,
placed it in a cultivated plot; 2
a shoot by abundant water,
like a willow he planted it.
19:10 “‘Your mother was like a vine in your vineyard, 3 planted by water.
It was fruitful and full of branches because it was well-watered.
1 tn Heb “took of the seed of the land.” For the vine imagery, “seedling” is a better translation, though in its subsequent interpretation the “seed” refers to Zedekiah through its common application to offspring.
2 tn Heb “a field for seed.”
3 tc The Hebrew text reads “in your blood,” but most emend to “in your vineyard,” assuming a ב-כ (beth-kaph) confusion. See L. C. Allen, Ezekiel (WBC), 1:284. Another attractive emendation assumes a faulty word division and yields the reading “like a vine full of tendrils, which/because…”; see D. I. Block, Ezekiel (NICOT), 1:607, n. 68.