Then I will strike your bow from your left hand, and will make your arrows drop out of your right hand: When Gog and his army reach the land of Israel, God will disarm them and make them unable to fight. The connector Then may be rendered “When you reach Israel.” This verse pictures Gog as a right-handed man who holds a bow in his left hand and takes arrows out of their holder with his right hand. There is no significance in Gog being a right-handed man, so since left-handed people can also use bows and arrows, it is not necessary to be so precise in translation. Most translators find that they can follow the text of this verse fairly closely. A model that does this is “Then I will knock the bow out of your left hand and make you drop the arrows you are carrying in your right hand.” New Living Translation (1996) says “I will knock your weapons from your hands and leave you helpless.” This is a good model for translators who want to render the sense clearly or in places where a bow and arrows are not known. A bow with arrows is almost a universally known weapon, either for hunting or for fighting. A bow is a curved, flexible piece of wood with one piece of string tied to each end. When someone pulls the string, the wood bends so that, when the person lets go of the string, it shoots an arrow out at great speed toward a target. Arrows are short, sharp sticks that are shot out from a bow to hit an animal if someone is hunting for food, or to hit and kill an enemy in war.

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .