I will send famine and wild beasts against you: God will make the people hungry by cutting off their supply of food, and he will send animals to kill them. The pronoun you is plural in Hebrew, so it refers to the people of Jerusalem. However, the remaining second person pronouns in this verse are singular in Hebrew, referring to the city of Jerusalem. For clarity translators may need to identify Jerusalem explicitly at this point. But for the sake of naturalness in the language, it may also be necessary to render this clause as “Jerusalem, I will make your people die of hunger and I will send wild animals to kill them.”

And they will rob you of your children means the famine and the wild animals will kill the people in Jerusalem. The verb rob has nothing to do with stealing here; it just means “kill” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version) in this context. The people who lived in a city were regarded as its children, so God describes Jerusalem as a woman whose children will all be killed.

Pestilence and blood shall pass through you: Jerusalem’s people will become sick due to the spread of disease in the besieged city, and they will be slaughtered. Blood is an image for violent death. The Hebrew words for pestilence (deber) and blood (dam) are similar, so they form a play on words. Although the Hebrew does not actually say that God will cause the disease and violent death, this is implied, so this clause may be rendered “I will bring disease and death to you” or “I will cause you to die from disease and violence.”

And I will bring the sword upon you: The idea here is similar to that in verses 2 and 12, where God says he will “unsheathe the sword” and kill the people. The clause here refers to the people who are killed in the city during or after the siege. It pictures God holding a sword and killing the people. It is a metaphor of the way God allowed the enemies of Jerusalem to conquer the city and kill all its people. It is acceptable to omit the metaphor by saying “and I will allow your enemies to kill all your inhabitants” (similarly Contemporary English Version).

I, the LORD, have spoken is the concluding refrain of the paragraph and also of the whole chapter (see the comments on verse 15). It completes with full impact the divine judgment on Jerusalem and its people.

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 .