Your ways and your doings mean essentially the same thing, and may be expressed as verb constructions: “The way you have gone” and “the things you have done.” For some languages it will be impossible to speak of ways and doings bringing something upon someone, and for other languages it will be unnatural. Thus Good News Translation makes a shift: “you have brought this on yourself by the way you have lived and by the things you have done.”

This is your doom, and it is bitter is more literally “This [is] your evil that [it is] bitter.” The word translated doom by Revised Standard Version is the more general word for “evil,” and is rendered “wickedness” by Revised Standard Version in verse 14. Good News Translation translates this clause as “Your sin has caused this suffering,” and Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch has “Your evil has hurled you into this bitter sorrow.”

It has reached your very heart (Good News Translation “it has stabbed you through the heart”) appears in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch as “It is the sword that has pierced you through the heart.” Another way to understand the last two lines would be “Your evil has brought on this bitter sorrow and threatens the very core of your being [or, threatens to destroy you at your very center].”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .