And when I looked, behold: When it is put together with when I looked, it is a Hebrew idiom that adds dramatic emphasis to the simple meaning, “I saw.” Some translations try to capture this emphasis with “I looked and saw” (New Century Version, Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch; similarly New International Version). Others do it in different ways, for example, “I saw, to my surprise” (Brownlee), “Just then, I saw” (Contemporary English Version), and “As I looked, there was” (New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh). Some emphasis like this is desirable to add to the dramatic impact of the text.

A hand was stretched out to me: We should probably understand this to be a vision of God’s hand. If it is necessary to specify which hand is meant, the right hand should be chosen. This clause may be rendered “a hand was reaching out toward me.”

And lo, a written scroll was in it: Lo renders the same Hebrew term as behold. Here it provides a dramatic vividness to the description of the vision. Most translations ignore it, because this Hebrew idiom is unnatural in the receptor languages. This is permissible, as long as some dramatic emphasis has been included in the earlier part of the verse. God’s hand was holding a written scroll as it reached out toward Ezekiel. In Old Testament times books consisted of sheets of papyrus or specially prepared leather that were pasted together in one a long strip. Attached to each end was a wooden rod, and the strip of papyrus or leather was rolled up like a tube around the rods. To read the scroll, a person unrolled it from one rod, so that the writing became visible, and then progressively rolled it up on the other rod. If the scroll was small enough, the paper would just be rolled up by itself, without the wooden rods. It was probably a small scroll of this sort that Ezekiel saw the hand of God giving to him. For languages that have difficulty expressing the term scroll, the term “book” may be used, but since “book” would be misleading, “rolled up piece of writing paper” may be better. It may also be desirable to include an illustration of a scroll alongside the text of their translations. A possible model for this clause is “and in it was [or, I saw] a scroll with writing on it.”

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 .