Imamat 26:20

26:20 Your strength will be used up in vain, your land will not give its yield, and the trees of the land ¹  will not produce their fruit.

Mazmur 129:7

129:7 which cannot fill the reaper’s hand,

or the lap of the one who gathers the grain!

Yesaya 5:10

5:10 Indeed, a large vineyard ²  will produce just a few gallons, ³ 

and enough seed to yield several bushels ⁴  will produce less than a bushel.” ⁵ 

Yeremia 12:13

12:13 My people will sow wheat, but will harvest weeds. ⁶ 

They will work until they are exhausted, but will get nothing from it.

They will be disappointed in their harvests ⁷ 

because the Lord will take them away in his fierce anger. ⁸ 

Hosea 8:7

The Fertility Cultists Will Become Infertile

8:7 They sow the wind,

and so they will reap the whirlwind!

The stalk does not have any standing grain;

it will not produce any flour.

Even if it were to yield grain,

foreigners would swallow it all up.

Mikha 6:15

6:15 You will plant crops, but will not harvest them;

you will squeeze oil from the olives, ⁹  but you will have no oil to rub on your bodies; ¹⁰ 

you will squeeze juice from the grapes, but you will have no wine to drink. ¹¹ 

Hagai 1:6

1:6 You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but are never filled. You drink, but are still thirsty. You put on clothes, but are not warm. Those who earn wages end up with holes in their money bags.’” ¹² 

Hagai 1:9

1:9 ‘You expected a large harvest, but instead ¹³  there was little, and when you brought it home it disappeared right away. ¹⁴  Why?’ asks the Lord who rules over all. ‘Because my temple remains in ruins, thanks to each of you favoring his own house! ¹⁵ 

[26:20]  ¹ tn Heb “the tree of the land will not give its fruit.” The collective singular has been translated as a plural. Tg. Onq., some medieval Hebrew mss, Smr, LXX, and Tg. Ps.-J. have “the field” as in v. 4, rather than “the land.”

[5:10]  ² tn Heb “a ten-yoke vineyard.” The Hebrew term צֶמֶד (tsemed, “yoke”) is here a unit of square measure. Apparently a ten-yoke vineyard covered the same amount of land it would take ten teams of oxen to plow in a certain period of time. The exact size is unknown.

[5:10]  ³ tn Heb “one bath.” A bath was a liquid measure. Estimates of its modern equivalent range from approximately six to twelve gallons.

[5:10]  ⁴ tn Heb “a homer.” A homer was a dry measure, the exact size of which is debated. Cf. NCV “ten bushels”; CEV “five bushels.”

[5:10]  ⁵ tn Heb “an ephah.” An ephah was a dry measure; there were ten ephahs in a homer. So this verse envisions major crop failure, where only one-tenth of the anticipated harvest is realized.

[12:13]  ⁶ sn Invading armies lived off the land, using up all the produce and destroying everything they could not consume.

[12:13]  ⁷ tn The pronouns here are actually second plural: Heb “Be ashamed/disconcerted because of your harvests.” Because the verb form (וּבֹשׁוּ, uvoshu) can either be Qal perfect third plural or Qal imperative masculine plural many emend the pronoun on the noun to third plural (see, e.g., BHS). However, this is the easier reading and is not supported by either the Latin or the Greek which have second plural. This is probably another case of the shift from description to direct address that has been met with several times already in Jeremiah (the figure of speech called apostrophe; for other examples see, e.g., 9:4; 11:13). As in other cases the translation has been leveled to third plural to avoid confusion for the contemporary English reader. For the meaning of the verb here see BDB 101 s.v. בּוֹשׁ Qal.2 and compare the usage in Jer 48:13.

[12:13]  ⁸ tn Heb “be disappointed in their harvests from the fierce anger of the Lord.” The translation makes explicit what is implicit in the elliptical poetry of the Hebrew original.

[6:15]  ⁹ tn Heb “you will tread olives.” Literally treading on olives with one’s feet could be harmful and would not supply the necessary pressure to release the oil. See O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, 119. The Hebrew term דָּרַךְ (darakh) may have an idiomatic sense of “press” here, or perhaps the imagery of the following parallel line (referring to treading grapes) has dictated the word choice.

[6:15]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “but you will not rub yourselves with oil.”

[6:15]  ¹¹ tn Heb “and juice, but you will not drink wine.” The verb תִדְרֹךְ (tidrokh, “you will tread”) must be supplied from the preceding line.

[1:6]  ¹² tn Some translate “pockets” (so NLT) but the Hebrew word צְרוֹר (tsÿror) refers to a bag, pouch, or purse of money (BDB 865 s.v. צְרוֹר; HALOT 1054 s.v. צְרוֹר 1). Because coinage had been invented by the Persians and was thus in use in Haggai’s day, this likely is a money bag or purse rather than pouches or pockets in the clothing. Since in contemporary English “purse” (so NASB, NIV, NCV) could be understood as a handbag, the present translation uses “money bags.”

[1:9]  ¹³ tn Heb “look!” (הִנֵּה, hinneh). The term, an interjection, draws attention to the point being made.

[1:9]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “I blew it away” (so NRSV, TEV, NLT). The imagery here suggests that human achievements are so fragile and temporal that a mere breath from God can destroy them (see Ezek 22:20, 21; and Isa 40:7 with נָשַׁב, nashav).

[1:9]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “and each of you runs to his own house”; NIV “is busy with”; TEV “is busy working on”; NCV “work hard for.”