The priests sell the sacrifices that are offered to these gods and use the money: As in the previous verse, Revised Standard Version renders a third person pronoun in the Greek text as these gods for clarity (see Revised Standard Version footnote). The meaning of the first sentence here is straightforward, and clear in both Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation. Two elements of the meaning are missing, however. First, the Greek term for sacrifices is in a position of emphasis at the beginning of the sentence; secondly, the word for use has overtones of “misuse.” New Jerusalem Bible has a good rendering: “Whatever is sacrificed to them, the priests re-sell and pocket the profit.” The sentence can be understood another way as follows: “The priests misuse the sacrifices by selling them.” But although this is grammatically possible, it conflicts with the line of thought here, since it assumes that offering sacrifices to the gods is all right, and it’s the priests who are doing wrong with how they use them. The word sacrifices is not the same word as “gifts” in verse 27, but it is possible to translate in such a way that the thought of verse 27 follows through into verse 28: “Bringing gifts to idols is as useless as bringing them to dead people. Anyway, the priests are just going to take the sacrifices that are brought, sell them, and spend the money on themselves.”

Likewise their wives preserve some with salt: It would be hard to improve on the way New English Bible leads into this sentence: “Their wives are no better….” Good News Translation creates a confusing picture: in the first sentence the priests sell the sacrifices, and in this one their wives preserve the sacrifices. The Greek says only that the women preserve some of what is sacrificed. What the women are doing is treating the meat of the sacrifices with some kind of preservative so that it could be eaten later. Salt is not actually mentioned, but it was surely involved. The Contemporary English Version translation is helpful: “And their wives use salt to preserve the meat that is left over from the sacrifices, then save it for their own use.”

But give none to the poor or helpless: In Israelite practice certain sacrifices were to be shared with “the poor and helpless” (see Deut 14.28-29; 26.12-13).

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.