And alongside the territory of the priests: This phrase repeats the sense of the last phrase of the previous verse. If such repetition is not clumsy and unnatural, translators will do well to retain it.

The Levites shall have an allotment twenty-five thousand cubits in length and ten thousand in breadth: The Levites’ land will be the same size as the priests’ land (see verse 10).

The whole length shall be twenty-five thousand cubits and the breadth twenty thousand: There are some problems here. If The whole length refers to the Levites’ land, why has God repeated the information from the previous sentence? Some translations simply omit this sentence (so Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version, New International Reader’s Version). However, some translations have taken The whole length to refer to the Levites’ and the priests’ land combined (so New Living Translation with “Together these portions of land”). Translations that do this then follow the Septuagint and read twenty thousand in breadth, so that the measurements agree with the previous figures. The Hebrew text has “the breadth [will be] ten thousand [cubits].” The Septuagint gives a possible reading here, even though Hebrew Old Testament Text Project recommends against it because it involves changing the Hebrew. And it becomes the preferred reading if verse 14 also refers to both sections of land. However, if verse 14 refers to the Levites’ land only, the reference to the whole section of land at the end of this verse is quite out of context. Translators may follow either of these readings, so possible models for this sentence are “The size of both sections of the holy land combined will be 12.5 kilometers long by 10 kilometers wide” and “The size of the [Levites’] land will be 12.5 kilometers long by 5 kilometers wide.”

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 .