Exegesis:
ēsan de dikaioi amphoteroi enantion tou theou ‘and they were both righteous before God.’ amphoteroi ‘both’ is in apposition to the subject ‘they.’
dikaios ‘upright,’ ‘righteous,’ i.e. he who lives and acts according to the will of God as expressed in his law, and wins his favour. Here the religious aspect of the term is stressed by enantion tou theou, and by the appositional phrase poreuomenoi … amemptoi ‘walking … blameless.’
enantion with genitive ‘in the presence of,’ or ‘in the sight, or, judgment of.’ In the present context enantion tou theou means that God is the judge of their righteousness; therefore it seems less correct to render dikaioi enantion tou theou as “upright and devout” (New English Bible), or, “truly religious” (Phillips).
poreuomenoi en pasais tais entolais kai dikaiōmasin tou kuriou amemptoi ‘walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.’
poreuomai ‘to depart,’ ‘to go,’ here in the figurative sense ‘to walk in,’ the commandments and ordinances being, as it were, the way on which one walks or goes.
entolē ‘commandment,’ both human (cf. 15.29) and divine (as here).
dikaiōma ‘ordinance,’ ‘requirement.’ Although entolē and dikaiōma differ in gender they have in common the article tais and the adjective pasais ‘all’ (morphologically going with entolais, being the nearest of the two substantives), because they are very similar in meaning.
kurios occurs in Luke with the following meanings:
(1) ‘master’ (of slave or servant) in 12.36f, 42b-47; 14.21; 16.3-13 (but cf. on 16.8), or ‘owner’ (with objective genitive) in 19.33 (colt); 20.13-15 (vineyard), or ‘ruler (over)’ in 6.5 (sabbath); 10.2 (harvest); 10.21 (heaven and earth); in this last meaning it refers either directly or implicitly to a divine ruler.
(2) in the vocative kurie as a polite form of address, used (a) by slaves or servants to address their master, see 13.8; 14.22; 19.16-20, 25. In 13.25 it is used by guests when addressing their host and best rendered as ‘sir’; (b) to address Jesus. This may be rendered as ‘Lord,’ or as ‘lord,’ preferably the latter since it is a polite form of address, rather than a christological title (cf. TWNT III, 1085, 1092f). kurie in this meaning occurs in 5.8, 12; 6.46; 7.6; 9.54, [59,] 61; 10.17, 40; 11.1; 12.41; 13.23; 17.37; 18.41; 19.8; 22.33, 38, 49.
(3) as a title (‘the Lord’) referring to Jesus, used by Luke under the influence of later Christian usage, with the connotation of royal power. In this meaning it occurs in 7.13, 19; 10.1, 39, 41; 11.39; 12.42; 13.15; 17.5f; 18.6; 19.8, 31, 34; 22.61. In 1.43 and 20.42 it is followed by the possessive pronoun mou ‘my’ and refers to the expected Messiah (which applies also to 20.44). For 2.11 see the note there.
(4) ‘the Lord,’ following Septuagint usage, where kurios renders Hebrew ʾadonay when standing for Yahweh. It has this meaning in all occurrences in chapters 1 and 2 (except 1.43 and 2.11), and in 5.17, and furthermore in Old Testament quotations in 3.4; 4.8, 12, 18f; 10.27; 13.35; 19.38; 20.37, 42.
amemptos ‘blameless.’ Here amemptoi is the complement of dikaioi as e.g. in Job 12.4. Syntactically it goes with poreuomenoi … tou kuriou, indicating the result of it: they were observing the commandments and requirements of the Lord in such a way that they were blameless. Several translations render it adverbially (“blamelessly”) which is acceptable only as a second best rendering.
Translation:
They … both, or more fully, ‘Zechariah as well as Elizabeth,’ ‘Z. and his wife with him’ (Apache), ‘the pair of them (lit. they man-woman)’ (Balinese).
Before God, or, in a verbal clause, ‘as judged by God,’ ‘as seen by God’ (Shipibo-Conibo); or with a further syntactic restructuring, ‘God was considering both … to-be-righteous’ (cf. Kituba). The phrase does not limit the righteousness (“only in God’s judgment—not in that of men”), but defines and intensifies it.
Walking in, i.e. ‘behaving/living according to,’ ‘doing things according to,’ ‘observing.’ The verb is rendered by ‘to follow’ (Bible de Jérusalem, Kituba), ‘to perform’ (Thai, employing a form of ‘to walk’ that is mainly used metaphorically), ‘to fulfil’ (Shipibo-Conibo, using a term of high cultural relevance that refers to the fitness of things).
Commandments and ordinances of the Lord. The two synonyms are reinforcing one another; therefore, they have sometimes been rendered by one phrase, e.g. ‘words all themes,’ understood to mean ‘commandments’ because it goes with ‘observe/obey’ (Ekari), ‘the law the Lord had set them’ (Sranan Tongo). Commandment, or, ‘command,’ is often better rendered by a verbal phrase; hence e.g. ‘what the Lord has commanded, or, has told people to do,’ ‘the way the Lord put it’ (San Blas Kuna), cf. also ‘what he (i.e. the Lord) caused-to-follow’ (the Tboli rendering of “ordinances”). Rather often the more generic term ‘word’ (e.g. in Shipibo-Conibo, Balinese, Hebrew), or ‘spoken-word’ (Yucateco) can do duty for ‘command(-ment),’ since the context shows that this ‘word’ is spoken by one in authority and, therefore, is a command.
The Lord. One should preferably use one rendering for the various occurrences of Gr. kurios mentioned in Exegesis, especially for those of the categories (2b), (3), (4), although this may imply the use of a rendering having a certain degree of foreignness that can only be overcome by use and teaching. Even then, however, it proves impossible in some languages to find such a passe-partout, especially in socially stratified cultures with correspondingly differentiated linguistic forms. In such cases there may be three, if not more, distinctive terms to render kurios, i.e. (a) a word used with reference to a person to whom one owes allegiance, and as ordinary form of polite address, roughly covering the occurrences of categories (1) and (2a); (b) a word from the sphere of chieftainship or royalty to be used of the Messiah, the Davidic king of Israel, as expected by the Jews (in 1.43; 2.11; 20.42); and (c) a term referring to a divine Lord (such as Rabb in Arabic, ‘Venerated-one’ in Balinese), to be used in all occurrences of category (4), and, probably, in 10.21. The problem then is what term to choose when kurios refers to Jesus. In category (2b) one can best choose a term (d) that is more polite than the one mentioned under (a), preferably a reverent form of address. In category (3), where kurios characterizes Jesus as the universal king, to whom “all authority in heaven and earth had been given” (Matthew 28.18), one may hesitate between terms in the line of (b) or of (c), but traditionally the preference is for (c).
A solution along these lines is found in several versions, often with interesting differences in detail. Thus Revised Standard Version uses, “sir”, “master” in the occurrences of category (1) and (2a), but “Lord” in the other occurrences (and “LORD” for Yahweh in the O.T.). Statenvertaling and Nieuwe Vertaling make an arbitrary distinction between heer (‘lord,’ ‘sir’) for categories (1) and (2a) and an archaistic form of the same, Here (in O.T. HERE) for the rest; similarly in Malay and Bahasa Indonesia (tuan, Tuhan, TUHAN). In Arabic, which differentiated between Rabb (‘Lord’) for God and Sayyid (a title of prophets and of the descendant of Mohammed) for Jesus, the revisers have shifted to Rabb in some occurrences of categories (2b) and (3). The revised Tamil version uses two words which are the same in meaning but different in form, i.e. the Sanskrit word for ‘Lord’ when the reference is to God, and its Tamil equivalent with reference to Jesus. An interesting solution is found in Thai. In this language the usual rendering of ‘God’ has the basic meaning ‘Lord.’ This term has also been used to render kurios in the occurrences of category (4), but then it is specified by the addition of a familiar Thai symbol indicating that a name is to be understood with the term, which name is so well known that it need not be added specifically in writing, nor be pronounced. The same term is used when kurios refers to Jesus, but then the form is modified in such a way as to provide an arbitrary distinction, while preserving the basic meaning.
In honorific languages the alternative renderings discussed above may have consequences also for the level of honorifics to be used in the context.
Blameless, or, ‘no one could scold them’ (Shipibo-Conibo), or, ‘being perfect.’ In Sranan Tongo “walking in the commandments … blameless” has been rendered, ‘without missing one thing of the law….’
Quoted with permission from Reiling, J. and Swellengrebel, J.L. A Handbook on the Gospel of Luke. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1971. For this and other handbooks for translators see here . Make sure to also consult the Handbook on the Gospel of Mark for parallel or similar verses.