When you offer your gifts and sacrifice your sons by fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols to this day: For offer your gifts and sacrifice your sons by fire, see verse 26. Sons refers to sons and daughters in this context, so translators may say “children” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version). For you defile yourselves with all your idols, see Ezek 20.7. For to this day, see verse 29. Here this phrase shows that the people were continuing to sin. Many translators find it more natural to move this phrase to the beginning of the verse, as in “Even now you are making yourselves unclean [or, unfit for my worship] by offering gifts to idols and sacrificing your children to them in fire.” Depending on how the question in verse 30 was rendered, these clauses will either continue the conditional statement or be a statement of the way the people were sinning. If translators interpreted the question in the previous verse as a conditional clause, then they may render verses 30b-31a as “If you make yourselves unacceptable to me the way your ancestors did by acting like a prostitute with those things I hate, 31 and if to this very day you are unacceptable to me by offering gifts to idols and sacrificing your children to them.”

And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? is a rhetorical question, the real meaning of which is stated clearly with an oath in the last sentence As I live, says the Lord GOD, I will not be inquired of by you. Because of the Israelites’ sins, God refuses their request to consult him. For this question and answer, see the comments on Ezek 20.3. Here translators may say “So, people of Israel, I will not let you ask me anything. No, as surely as I the Lord Yahweh am alive, I promise I am not going to accept any questions from you” (similarly New Century Version).

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 .