| 11. Linguistic Exegesis The verse is a tight two-line parallelism: a first clause of granting followed by a second clause of reversal. The verbs etten-lekha {אֶ֣תְּן־לְךָ֕ | ʾet-ten-lə-ḵā} ‘I give you’ and ve-eqqakh {וְאֶקַּ֖ח | wə-ʾeqqaḥ} ‘and I take’ are coordinated with vav, producing a sharp contrast between bestowal and removal. Each verb is followed by a prepositional phrase—be-api {בְּאַפִּ֔י | bə-ʾap-pî} ‘in My anger’ and be-evrati {בְּעֶבְרָתִֽי | bə-ʿeḇ-rā-tî} ‘in My wrath’—which frames both actions as driven by divine displeasure. Although the Hebrew forms are imperfect, in this prophetic context they are naturally read as a retrospective divine assessment of what God did in Israel’s history; English past tense communicates that discourse force while keeping the same agent (“I”) and the same emotional motivation (“in My anger… in My wrath”). The object “him” with “took away” is supplied from the prior “king,” reflecting Hebrew ellipsis in the second clause. |