10:5

Moses wrote this commandment for you because of your hardness of heart: The phrase because of your hardness of heart is a reason phrase. The clause Moses wrote this commandment for you is a result clause. In some languages, it is more natural to put the reason clause first. For example:

Because of your hardness of heart, Moses wrote this commandment for you.
-or-
Your hearts were hard, so Moses wrote you this law.

Moses wrote this commandment for you: The phrase this commandment refers here to what the Pharisees said in 10:4b–c. They said that Moses permitted a man to write his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away. Here Jesus spoke of this permission as a commandment that Moses wrote for the people.

Here are some other ways to translate this:

Moses wrote that command for you (New Century Version)
-or-
Moses wrote you this law (New International Version)
-or-
Moses wrote this permission as a law for you

this commandment: The phrase this commandment refers to the law in 10:4. Use a natural expression that refers back to 10:4.

you: The pronoun you is plural and refers to the Pharisees. But Moses lived fifteen hundred years before Jesus, and his law was for Jews of all generations. So it may be necessary to translate this as:

you and your ancestors

It may also be possible to leave the phrase “for you” implicit here. For example, the New Living Translation says:

He wrote this commandment only as a concession to your hard hearts.

• You may also want to include a footnote. For example:

Moses wrote this law fifteen hundred years before the time of Jesus. His law was for the Jews of that time as well as future generations.

because of your hardness of heart: The Greek phrase that the Berean Standard Bible literally translates as your hardness of heart is an idiom. It means “you were stubborn” or “you were not willing to change.”

Here are some other ways to translate this phrase:

• Use an equivalent idiom in your language that means “stubborn.”

• Translate the meaning directly. For example:

because you were stubborn (New Century Version)
-or-
because of your stubbornness (Revised English Bible)
-or-
because you refused to accept God’s teaching
-or-
because you always refuse to obey God

© 2008 by SIL International®

Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.