564 TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTSand you did what is right in my eyes. Even though the release may have been
done with mixed motives, it is said here to have been a right action.
and you cut a covenant before me in the house upon which my name is called.
The covenant was made in the Temple, at which time the Law of the Jubilee
was solemnly proclaimed. For the expression "the house upon which my name
is called," see Note for 7: 10.- then you turned around. Hebrew wattasubU. Another play on sub, which
meant "you repented" in v 15. Here people are said to have turned in the
wrong direction, violating the covenant they had just made to release the He-
brew slaves. See the earlier play on sub in v 11.
and profaned my name. Hebrew watteballelu )et-semi. On the profanation of
Yahweh's name, see also Amos 2:7 and Mal 1: 11-12. In Jer 16: 18, idols are said
to have profaned Yahweh's land.
according to their desire. On nepes meaning "desire,'' see 22:27 and Deut
21: 14.
and you subjugated them to be for you male slaves and female slaves. The
LXX texts of both Rahlfs and Ziegler omit "and you subjugated them to be,"
relegating the inclusion of the articular infinitive, tou einai ("to be"), to a mi-
nority reading. But Field (1875: 675) in his critical work on Origen's Hexapla
takes the omission to be only "and you subjugated them,'' noting also that Aq
and Theod have the words. They are present also in T and Vg. The smaller
omission can be attributed to haplography (homoeoteleuton: m ... m), and a
loss of the remaining lihy6t (to be") can also be explained by haplography (ho-
moeoarcton: l ... l). There is no reason, in any case, to delete the words as an
MT addition taken from v 11 (pace Janzen 1973: 51; Holladay). - You, you have not listened to me to proclaim liberty each person to his kin
and each person to his fellow. The fact that the king and the people reneged on
the covenant makes it seem as if they did not listen to Yahweh at all, putting
their disobedience on the same level as that of earlier generations (v l 4b ). The
LXX omits "each person to his kin and," which is likely (pace G. Greenberg
2001: 235) due to haplography (whole-word plus: )ys l ... )ys l).
You, you have not listened to me to proclaim liberty .... Look I am proclaim-
ing liberty to you ... to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine. The two
oracles together play on "proclaim liberty," the second usage of which is bitter
irony, since the people will not attain liberty but instead will be reduced to sla-
very (Chotzner 1883: 13-14). See a similar irony in 15:2-3. The punishment
here will fit the crime (Calvin; Giesebrecht; P. D. Miller 1984: "poetic jus-
tice"). On the triad, "sword, famine, and pestilence," see Note for 5:12.
a fright. Hebrew za<awa (Q); zewa<a (Kt). On the Q-Kt, see Note for 15:4.
- And I will make the men who walked over my covenant, who did not carry
out the words of the covenant that they cut before me, the calf that they cut in two
and walked between its parts. Here is a double wordplay on the verbs <hr,
"walked (over),'' and krt, "cut." The LXX not only misses the wordplays but gets
the whole sense wrong. According to its translation, the men who transgressed
the covenant are given the calf they had prepared for the sacrifice. The curse