And behold in some languages may be translated as “Look.” Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version prefer “And now.”
They have been cast out to the heat of day and the frost of night: Good News Translation says in the previous verse that the bones were “scattered,” which anticipates this clause. The Greek verb translated cast out suggests in this context being thrown out and exposed. The same expression is used of King Jehoiakim in Jer 36.30 (43.30 in Greek). There Good News Translation translates “Your corpse will be thrown out where it will be exposed to the sun during the day and to the frost at night.” Here at this passage in Baruch, Good News Translation has isolated the two aspects of meaning and separated them. “Scattered” describes the bones that have been thrown out of the tombs, and it is moved forward into verse 24 because it follows naturally after “taken from their tombs.” In verse 25 “lie exposed” translates the other aspect of the meaning of the verb. We should note that while scattering would be the net effect of throwing bones out of tombs, it should not be understood to mean that they were transported to some other place, or scattered as seed would be. A better rendering here would probably be “they have been thrown on the ground….” or, as Contemporary English Version translates, “[they] lie scattered all over….”
For to the heat of day and the frost of night Contemporary English Version has “scorched by the sun during the day and covered with frost at night.” In cultures where frost is unknown, we may say “frozen rain.” Most translators, however, in this modern age are familiar with older refrigerators and the frozen substance that builds up in their freezer units. Frost is similar to that.
They perished in great misery, by famine and sword and pestilence: The problem here is to make clear who we are talking about. Surely most readers would assume that the writer means the kings and ancestors whose burial places were desecrated. But we are really talking here about carrying out the threatened punishment on Judah, the desecration of the graves (verse 24), the destruction of the temple (verse 26), and here, the miserable deaths of the people. Moore supplies “The people” as the subject of this sentence, and he is surely correct in doing so; other translators should follow his lead. The group of three terms famine and sword and pestilence occurs several times in Jeremiah (for example, 14.12; 24.10; 32.36; 38.2). Famine means “starvation” (Contemporary English Version), the sword stands for death through “war” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version), and pestilence refers to highly contagious diseases such as the bubonic plague. If we take “the people” as the subject of this final sentence, we may alternatively translate it as “The people died horrible deaths from starvation, war, and disease.”
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.