7:27 1 Blessed be the Lord God of our fathers, who so moved in the heart of the king to so honor the temple of the Lord which is in Jerusalem!
21:1 The king’s heart 2 is in the hand 3 of the Lord like channels of water; 4
he turns it wherever he wants.
1 sn At this point the language of the book reverts from Aramaic (7:12-26) back to Hebrew.
2 sn “Heart” is a metonymy of subject; it signifies the ability to make decisions, if not the decisions themselves.
3 sn “Hand” in this passage is a personification; the word is frequently used idiomatically for “power,” and that is the sense intended here.
4 tn “Channels of water” (פַּלְגֵי, palge) is an adverbial accusative, functioning as a figure of comparison – “like channels of water.” Cf. NAB “Like a stream”; NIV “watercourse”; NRSV, NLT “a stream of water.”
sn The farmer channels irrigation ditches where he wants them, where they will do the most good; so does the