For …: The Greek text begins this verse with a causal conjunction, but the causal connection with verse 19 is quite loose. Trying to express it may cause more trouble than faithfulness to the text calls for. Good News Translation and New American Bible ignore it. New Jerusalem Bible opens effectively with “No, you have sent down your anger and your fury on us….” Another effective opening may be “No, you were angry and punished us….”

Thou hast sent thy anger and thy wrath: Good News Translation “You turned your anger and wrath against us” and Contemporary English Version “You have punished us in your anger” catch the force of the Greek verb rendered sent a bit better. This verb has the sense of sending with powerful anger. The two words anger and wrath have substantially the same meaning, but the repetition has a cumulative effect. So we may translate “You were furiously angry, so you punished us” or “Your heart became so hot with anger that you punished us.”

As thou didst declare by thy servants the prophets, saying: In Greek this is literally “just as you spoke by the hand of your servants the prophets saying.” The sense of declare needs to be expressed more clearly. There are several options, such as “threatened” (Good News Translation), “warned” (Contemporary English Version, New American Bible, Revised English Bible), or even “promised” (Moore). Good News Translation “just as you had threatened to do when your servants the prophets spoke your word to us and said” is wordy and open to misinterpretation, since it is not clear that the word spoken by the prophets was the threat. It sounds as if the prophets spoke, and then God issued a threat. An alternative is “just as you warned us you would through your servants the prophets, when they said.”

By thy servants the prophets means “by using [or, causing] your servants the prophets.” However, in languages where prophets will be translated by something like “persons who proclaimed your message” (see the comments on Bar 1.15-18), we may say “just as your servants spoke your message giving us the following warning.” We may then restructure the verse as follows:

• You were furiously angry with us and punished us. This happened just as you warned us through your servants the prophets who said….

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Shorter Books of the Deuterocanon. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2006. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.