¹ tn Heb “And the silver and the gold Jehoiakim gave to Pharaoh, but he taxed the land to give the silver at the command of Pharaoh, [from] each according to his tax he collected the silver and the gold, from the people of the land, to give to Pharaoh Necho.”

¹ tn Grk “May your silver together with you be sent into destruction.” This is a strong curse. The gifts of God are sovereignly bestowed and cannot be purchased.

¹ sn This silver coin is a drachma, equal to a denarius, that is, a day’s pay for the average laborer.

² sn A denarius was a silver coin stamped with the image of the emperor and worth approximately one day’s wage for a laborer.

³ tn Heb “it.” Apparently the subject is the silver and gold mentioned earlier (see L. C. Allen, Ezekiel [WBC], 1:102).

³ sn The metaphors of silver becoming impure and beer being watered down picture the moral and ethical degeneration that had occurred in Jerusalem.

² tn E. Dhorme (Job, 339) connects this word with an Arabic root meaning “to be elevated, steep.” From that he gets “heaps of silver.”

¹ tn Heb “and he brought the holy things of his father and his holy things [into] the house of God, silver, gold, and items.”

¹ tn Heb “and they were bringing each one his gift, items of silver…and mules, the matter of a year in a year.”

¹ tn Heb “and every kind of skilled one in all work, concerning gold, concerning silver, and concerning bronze, and concerning iron, there is no numbering.”

¹ tn Heb “only the silver that is given into their hand should not be reckoned with them, for in faithfulness they are acting.”

⁴ tn Heb “all the silver which goes up on the heart of a man to bring to the house of the Lord.”

¹ tn Heb “and they were bringing each one his gift, items of silver…and mules, the matter of a year in a year.”

² tn The Hebrew text has “and gave it.” The referent (the pieces of silver) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

³ tn Heb “vessels of silver and vessels of gold.” These phrases both use genitives of material, telling what the vessels are made of.

⁶ tn Heb “passing for the merchant.” The final clause affirms that the measurement of silver was according to the standards used by the merchants of the time.

¹ sn Coins were not in common use until the postexilic period. Payment in gold and silver was made by cutting off pieces of silver or gold and weighing them in a beam balance using standard weights as the measure. A shekel weighed approximately 0.4 ounce or 11.4 grams. The English equivalents are only approximations.

² tn The form is a Niphal participle, masculine singular. If it is modifying “understanding” it should be a feminine form. If it is to be translated, it would have to be rendered “and to acquire understanding is to be chosen more than silver” (cf. KJV, ASV, NASB). Many commentaries consider it superfluous. NIV and NCV simply have “to choose understanding rather than silver!”

⁵ tn Heb “like little.” This expression refers to what has little value: “little worth” (so KJV, NAB, NRSV; cf. BDB 590 s.v. מְעַט 2.d). The point of the metaphor is clarified by the parallelism: Silver is valuable; the heart of the wicked is worth little. Tg. Prov 10:20 says it was full of dross, a contrast with choice silver.

² sn 400 pieces of silver. The standards for weighing money varied considerably in the ancient Near East, but the generally accepted weight for the shekel is 11.5 grams (0.4 ounce). This makes the weight of silver here 4.6 kilograms, or 160 ounces (about 10 pounds).