But Nehemiah warned them to stop this practice by threatening to arrest them. He did not give the Gentiles an advantage by allowing them to trade on the Sabbath. The translation warned is a good rendering of the Hebrew in view of the threat that Nehemiah makes, and because this is a legal, official setting. New English Bible says “I cautioned them.” In contemporary English, New Living Translation translates “I spoke sharply to them.”

Why do you lodge before the wall?: Once again Nehemiah’s words are cited in the form of a rhetorical question as a direct quotation. Through the question he blames them, but this overtone is lost in Good News Translation.

If you do so again I will lay hands on you: He follows the question with a conditional sentence. He states a condition, and if they fulfil that condition, he states what the result will be. This is a simple condition that if a certain thing happens, there will be a specific consequence. Some translations express this idiomatically as a threat: “Do it again, and I shall use force on you” (New Jerusalem Bible; similarly Revised English Bible).

I will lay hands on you is literally “I will stretch out [my] hand against you.” This is a Hebrew figure of speech that expresses the idea of attacking someone to cause harm or injury or even to kill (see Est 2.21; 8.7). Here Nehemiah does not say exactly what his intentions are. Many translations therefore retain an expression that is close to the Hebrew, for example, “I will lay hands on you” (Revised Standard Version, New International Version) and “I will lay hands upon you” (New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh). Other translations avoid the figure of speech and say “I’ll use force on you” (Good News Translation), “I will take action against you” (New English Bible), or “I will arrest you” (New Living Translation, Bible en français courant). Translators should use an appropriate expression for a threat, such as “I will take action against you” or “I’ll do thus and so to you!”

From that time on they did not come on the sabbath: Nehemiah introduces the result of his threat with the temporal phrase From that time on. New Jerusalem Bible says “After this,” referring back to Nehemiah’s threat. For the whole sentence Contemporary Chinese Bible has “From then on, they did not return anymore on the sabbath day.”

Quoted with permission from Noss, Philip A. and Thomas, Kenneth J. A Handbook on Nehemiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2005. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .