48:27 For did not you people of Moab laugh at the people of Israel?
Did you think that they were nothing but thieves, 5
that you shook your head in contempt 6
every time you talked about them? 7
1 tn Or “I said to her, ‘Come back to me!’” The verb אָמַר (’amar) usually means “to say,” but here it means “to think,” of an assumption that turns out to be wrong (so HALOT 66.4 s.v. אמר); cf. Gen 44:28; Jer 3:19; Pss 82:6; 139:11; Job 29:18; Ruth 4:4; Lam 3:18.
sn Open theists suggest that passages such as this indicate God has limited foreknowledge; however, more traditional theologians view this passage as an extended metaphor in which God presents himself as a deserted husband, hoping against hope that his adulterous wife might return to him. The point of the metaphor is not to make an assertion about God’s foreknowledge, but to develop the theme of God’s heartbreak due to Israel’s unrepentance.
2 tn The words “what she did” are not in the text but are implicit from the context and are supplied in the translation for clarification.
3 tn Heb “where I caused my name to dwell.” The translation does not adequately represent the theology of the
4 sn The place in Shiloh…see what I did to it. This refers to the destruction of Shiloh by the Philistines circa 1050
5 tn Heb “were they caught among thieves?”
6 tn Heb “that you shook yourself.” But see the same verb in 18:16 in the active voice with the object “head” in a very similar context of contempt or derision.
7 tc The reading here presupposes the emendation of דְבָרֶיךָ (dÿvarekha, “your words”) to דַבֶּרְךָ (dabberkha, “your speaking”), suggested by BHS (cf. fn c) on the basis of one of the Greek versions (Symmachus). For the idiom cf. BDB 191 s.v. דַּי 2.c.α.