Moreover, He shall cast you into Sheol, the edge of darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth – down into the lowest depths, into the great and profound pit from which there is no escape, forever and ever.
1 Meqabyan (also known as 1 Ethiopian Maccabees and 1 Ethiopic Maccabees) is canonical scripture for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. While “Meqabyan” is the Ge’ez equivalent of “Maccabees,” the content is completely different from 1 Maccabees. The only complete copies of 1 Meqabyan are available in Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), here used with permission by the Bible Society of Ethiopia.
The translation into English was provided by Haileyesus Woldemariam (UBS).
The Greek and Ge’ez that is translated as “weeping and gnashing of teeth” or similar in English is translated in the German New Testament translation by Berger / Nord (publ. 1999) with heulen und vor Schmerz mit den Zähnen klappern or “weep and chatter teeth in pain.”
Also in German, the idiom Heulen und Zähneklappern (originally: Heulen und Zähneklappen), which today is used to express anger and outrage, often in a humorous context (literally “weeping and chattering of teeth”), was first coined in 1522 in the German New Testament translation by Martin Luther. (Source: Günther 2017, p. 79)
In Russian, this phrase (Плач и скрежет зубов — Plach i skrezhet zubov) is also widely-used as an idiom, although less often in a humorous content. The wording of the quote originated in the Russian Synodal Bible (publ. 1876). (Source: Reznikov 2020, p. 45)
In French, the phrase pleurs et des grincements de dents is likewise used as an idiom. (Source: Muller 1991, p. 16)
The Hebrew, Latin, Ge’ez and Greek that is often translated in English as “Hades” or “Sheol” is translated in the German Luther Bible 2017 (and pre-1912) as Totenreich or “realm (or: kingdom) of the dead” in these verses. (Source: Jost Zetzsche)
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