Jeremiah 1:17

1:17 “But you, Jeremiah, 1  get yourself ready! 2  Go and tell these people everything I instruct you to say. Do not be terrified of them, or I will give you good reason to be terrified of them. 3 

Jeremiah 27:13

27:13 There is no reason why you and your people should die in war 4  or from starvation or disease! 5  That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation 6  that will not be subject to the king of Babylon.

1 tn The name “Jeremiah” is not in the text. The use of the personal pronoun followed by the proper name is an attempt to reflect the correlative emphasis between Jeremiah’s responsibility noted here and the Lord’s promise noted in the next verse. The emphasis in the Hebrew text is marked by the presence of the subject pronouns at the beginning of each of the two verses.

2 tn Heb “gird up your loins.” For the literal use of this idiom to refer to preparation for action see 2 Kgs 4:29; 9:1. For the idiomatic use to refer to spiritual and emotional preparation as here, see Job 38:3, 40:7, and 1 Pet 1:13 in the NT.

3 tn Heb “I will make you terrified in front of them.” There is a play on words here involving two different forms of the same Hebrew verb and two different but related prepositional phrases, “from before/of,” a preposition introducing the object of a verb of fearing, and “before, in front of,” a preposition introducing a spatial location.

4 tn Heb “with/by the sword.”

5 tn Heb “Why should you and your people die…?” The rhetorical question expects the answer made explicit in the translation, “There is no reason!”

6 tn Heb “…disease according to what the Lord spoke concerning the nation that…”