Then they wept, and fasted, and prayed before the Lord: “When the book was read” (Good News Translation; similarly Contemporary English Version) does not appear in the Greek text, but it is clearly what is intended by the connector Then and is helpful to the reader. It establishes that the weeping, fasting, and praying came about as a result of hearing the book being read; not that they had come together to hear a book being read, and weep, fast, and pray. In languages that do not have the passive voice, translators may say “When Baruch read the book” or “As Baruch was reading the book.”

In Greek the three actions of weeping, fasting, and praying are mentioned in the imperfect tense. This could be interpreted as the beginning of the action: “they began to weep, to fast, and to pray.” Fasting (that is, going without food) presents a problem in this series, since by its nature it requires hours, if not days. People can weep or pray briefly, but a fast of a few minutes’ duration is not very impressive. If we concentrate on the beginning of the action, a translation such as “they began to…” may help to avoid this problem. There is a further idea here: the people wept, fasted, and prayed before the Lord. This phrase appears to modify all three verbs, not simply the last one (as in Good News Translation and New English Bible “prayed to the Lord”). The intent is more like “they devoted [or, rededicated] themselves to the Lord in tears, with fasting and prayer.”

Lord (kurios in Greek) is the equivalent of the Hebrew word ʾadonay, which means “one who rules” or “master.” In some languages the word for Lord is also the word used to translate “chief,” and so the word “God” is added to make it clear who is being referred to; for example, “the chief God.”

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.