But the all-seeing Lord, the God of Israel, struck him an incurable and unseen blow: The Greek connector rendered But is better translated “In fact” (Good News Bible). It is used here to place emphasis on what follows. All-seeing translates a different Greek word than in 2Macc 7.35; this word means “one who sees everything/everyone.” Struck him an incurable and unseen blow means that God struck Antiochus as if with a fist, so hard that Antiochus would never recover from it. Unseen can be interpreted either of two ways. Good News Bible takes it to mean that no one could see God striking the blow by saying “invisible.” Goldstein takes it to mean that no ever saw such a disease before by saying “one never seen before.” Contemporary English Version is similar with “mysterious.” We prefer Goldstein’s interpretation, since the results of the disease were in fact visible.

As soon as he ceased speaking: Good News Bible joins this clause to the previous sentence by beginning with “In fact, as soon as he had said these words….” We recommend this. An alternative model for the first half of this verse is “In fact, as soon as he finished speaking, the Lord God of Israel, who sees everything, struck him with an incurable disease that no one had ever seen before.”

He was seized with a pain in his bowels for which there was no relief and with sharp internal tortures: Translators may try to remember their own worst experience with abdominal pain, magnify it in their imagination, and try to describe it here. One possible approach for the last half of this verse is “There was a sudden, sharp, excruciating [or, intense] pain in his bowels that would not go away.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on 1-2 Maccabees. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2011. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.