Ulangan 18:5

18:5 For the Lord your God has chosen them and their sons from all your tribes to stand ¹  and serve in his name ²  permanently.

Ulangan 18:2

18:2 They ³  will have no inheritance in the midst of their fellow Israelites; ⁴  the Lord alone is their inheritance, just as he had told them.

Ulangan 29:11

29:11 your infants, your wives, and the ⁵  foreigners living in your encampment, those who chop wood and those who carry water –

Mazmur 134:2

134:2 Lift your hands toward the sanctuary

and praise the Lord!

Mazmur 135:2

135:2 who serve ⁶  in the Lord’s temple,

in the courts of the temple of our God.

Yeremia 15:19

15:19 Because of this, the Lord said, ⁷ 

“You must repent of such words and thoughts!

If you do, I will restore you to the privilege of serving me. ⁸ 

If you say what is worthwhile instead of what is worthless,

I will again allow you to be my spokesman. ⁹ 

They must become as you have been.

You must not become like them. ¹⁰ 

Yehezkiel 44:11

44:11 Yet they will be ministers in my sanctuary, having oversight at the gates of the temple, and serving the temple. They will slaughter the burnt offerings and the sacrifices for the people, and they will stand before them to minister to them.

Yehezkiel 44:15

The Levitical Priests

44:15 “‘But the Levitical priests, the descendants of Zadok ¹¹  who kept the charge of my sanctuary when the people of Israel went astray from me, will approach me to minister to me; they will stand before me to offer me the fat and the blood, declares the sovereign Lord.

Roma 12:7

12:7 If it is service, he must serve; if it is teaching, he must teach;

[18:5]  ¹ tc Smr and some Greek texts add “before the Lord your God” to bring the language into line with a formula found elsewhere (Deut 10:8; 2 Chr 29:11). This reading is not likely to be original, however.

[18:5]  ² tn Heb “the name of the Lord.” The pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.

[18:2]  ³ tn Heb “he” (and throughout the verse).

[18:2]  ⁴ tn Heb “brothers,” but not referring to actual siblings. Cf. NASB “their countrymen”; NRSV “the other members of the community.”

[29:11]  ⁵ tn Heb “your.”

[135:2]  ⁶ tn Heb “stand.”

[15:19]  ⁷ tn Heb “So the Lord said thus.”

[15:19]  ⁸ tn Heb “If you return [ = repent], I will restore [more literally, ‘cause you to return’] that you may stand before me.” For the idiom of “standing before” in the sense of serving see BDB 764 s.v. עָמַד Qal.1.e and compare the usage in 1 Kgs 10:8; 12:8; 17:1; Deut 10:8.

[15:19]  ⁹ tn Heb “you shall be as my mouth.”

[15:19]  sn For the classic statement of the prophet as God’s “mouth/mouthpiece,” = “spokesman,” see Exod 4:15-16; 7:1-2.

[15:19]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “They must turn/return to you and you must not turn/return to them.”

[15:19]  sn Once again the root “return” (שׁוּב, shuv) is being played on as in 3:1–4:4. See the threefold call to repentance in 3:12, 14, 22. The verb is used here four times “repent,” “restore,” and “become” twice. He is to serve as a model of repentance, not an imitator of their apostasy. In accusing God of being unreliable he was coming dangerously close to their kind of behavior.

[44:15]  ¹¹ sn Zadok was a descendant of Aaron through Eleazar (1 Chr 6:50-53), who served as a priest during David’s reign (2 Sam 8:17).