Eat the flesh of your sons … daughters: Good News Translation makes explicit the reason for this act of cannibalism with “Your hunger will be so great….” Another way of doing this is to add at the end of the verse “… because of the famine.” And it also translates the separate clauses concerning sons and daughters by a single clause with “children.” This will serve as a good model in a number of other languages.

Quoted with permission from Péter-Contesse, René and Ellington, John. A Handbook on Leviticus. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1990. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .