Take wives reflects the marriage custom of the day. In Good News Translation Take wives and have sons and daughters is expressed simply as “Marry and have children.” Take wives for your sons … bear sons and daughters appears in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch as “Give your sons and daughters in marriage, so that they may also have children!” For some translators these solutions of Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch and Good News Translation may cause problems because they seem to obscure the Jewish culture in which marriage was seen as a male action. However, in this verse Jeremiah is not discussing how marriage took place, only telling people that it should take place, that they should go ahead and lead normal lives. So translators can use the normal expressions from their language for marriage, as Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch and Good News Translation have done.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .