This book is a song of praise, not a reference work, and the running text deliberately carries no footnotes. Yet the strongest claims rest on choices, and whoever wants to check them has a right to do so. This note names the load-bearing choices and points to where they find their ground — briefly, at the back, outside the running text, so that the worship is not interrupted by the apparatus.
The working translation and the Name
The Bible quotations are the author's own working translation: for the Old Testament from the Masoretic Text, for the New Testament from the Greek tradition, in the spirit of modern translations but without archaisms. The divine Name is consistently YHWH, not "the LORD"; where the source text has Adonai, it reads "Lord." The aim is always the same: to let the text sound as close as possible to its original color and force, and to give back its full weight to the proper name by which God made Himself known. Chapter-and-verse numbers follow the Hebrew (Masoretic) text; in a number of Psalms this differs by one verse from most English Bibles, so a reader using an English Bible may occasionally need to look one verse up or down. In the running argument the Hebrew chesed is rendered “devotion”; in the Psalm quotations it follows the familiar English idiom “steadfast love.”
The four shapes of incomparability
The book distinguishes four grammatical forms in which Scripture voices God's matchlessness: the rhetorical question (mi kamocha, "who is like You?"), the negation (ein kamocha, "there is no one like You"), the verb of comparison (ein aroch, "nothing can be ranked with You"), and God's own self-declaration ("I, and no other"). That the incomparability formulas form a distinct, recognizable motif in the Old Testament — and the study of their forms and functions — goes back to the classic work of C.J. Labuschagne (1966).
The grace formula (Exodus 34:6-7)
Several translation choices in the Name proclaimed on the mountain carry great weight. Chesed is rendered as "devotion" or "covenant faithfulness" rather than a loose mood; that covenantal freight has been thoroughly argued by, among others, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Rachum ("merciful") is linked to rechem, "womb"; erech appajim ("patient") literally means "long of nostrils"; notser chesed ("who keeps devotion") uses the verb of the watchman on the wall. That this formula echoes as a ground melody through the canon — in Joel, Jonah, Nahum, and Micah, in Psalms 86, 103, and 145 — is widely acknowledged in the scholarly literature.
Yashuv in Micah 7:19
Reading yashuv as an independent "He will return, He will have compassion again" — with God as the acting subject who turns back toward us — rather than merely adverbial "again," is a defensible choice supported in the scholarly literature, but it remains a choice; the adverbial reading is a real counter-voice.
The structural observations (the "seal of thirty-seven")
Wherever the book points to the equal length of Exodus 34:6-7 and Micah 7:18-20 (both thirty-seven graphic words), to their meaningful middle word, and to colon-counts around the number eleven, the same threefold rule applies throughout: the countable fact is well documented, its interpretation is a weighed reading, and the why remains speculative. The word "proven" does not fit here. These findings are meant as an occasion for wonder, never as evidence in a case.
God's deep feeling and unchangeableness
The relationship between God's deep feeling and His unchangeableness is worked out in the Excursus "A wounded God who does not change?" (Part II). The position taken there — "unchangeable" as steadfast rather than motionless; the distinction between what moves God from within and what happens to a human being from without; the classic doctrine of accommodation, in which God speaks in human images to make Himself understood — stands within the broad Christian tradition. It draws on Calvin's notion of accommodation (Institutes I.13.1: God "lisps" with us as a nurse does with a small child), on recent work on divine emotion such as that of Rob Lister, and, for the Old Testament image of God, on H.G.L. Peels' insight that God is "no abstraction, no sum of attributes" but "a Thou."
Literature (brief)
This list is illustrative, not exhaustive; it names the works on which the strongest choices rest.
C.J. Labuschagne, The Incomparability of Yahweh in the Old Testament (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1966; Pretoria Oriental Series V).
H.G.L. Peels, Wie is als Gij? Schaduwkanten van het oudtestamentische Godsbeeld [Who Is Like You? The Shadow Sides of the Old Testament Image of God] (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2007).
Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry (Harvard Semitic Monographs 17; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978).
Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013). Text editions and reference works: the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Nestle-Aland for the source text; the standard dictionaries and grammars of biblical Hebrew and Greek for the philological choices.
This book is a song of praise, not a reference work, and the running text deliberately carries no footnotes. Yet the strongest claims rest on choices, and whoever wants to check them has a right to do so. This note names the load-bearing choices and points to where they find their ground — briefly, at the back, outside the running text, so that the worship is not interrupted by the apparatus.
The working translation and the Name
The Bible quotations are the author's own working translation: for the Old Testament from the Masoretic Text, for the New Testament from the Greek tradition, in the spirit of modern translations but without archaisms. The divine Name is consistently YHWH, not "the LORD"; where the source text has Adonai, it reads "Lord." The aim is always the same: to let the text sound as close as possible to its original color and force, and to give back its full weight to the proper name by which God made Himself known. Chapter-and-verse numbers follow the Hebrew (Masoretic) text; in a number of Psalms this differs by one verse from most English Bibles, so a reader using an English Bible may occasionally need to look one verse up or down. In the running argument the Hebrew chesed is rendered “devotion”; in the Psalm quotations it follows the familiar English idiom “steadfast love.”
The four shapes of incomparability
The book distinguishes four grammatical forms in which Scripture voices God's matchlessness: the rhetorical question (mi kamocha, "who is like You?"), the negation (ein kamocha, "there is no one like You"), the verb of comparison (ein aroch, "nothing can be ranked with You"), and God's own self-declaration ("I, and no other"). That the incomparability formulas form a distinct, recognizable motif in the Old Testament — and the study of their forms and functions — goes back to the classic work of C.J. Labuschagne (1966).
The grace formula (Exodus 34:6-7)
Several translation choices in the Name proclaimed on the mountain carry great weight. Chesed is rendered as "devotion" or "covenant faithfulness" rather than a loose mood; that covenantal freight has been thoroughly argued by, among others, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Rachum ("merciful") is linked to rechem, "womb"; erech appajim ("patient") literally means "long of nostrils"; notser chesed ("who keeps devotion") uses the verb of the watchman on the wall. That this formula echoes as a ground melody through the canon — in Joel, Jonah, Nahum, and Micah, in Psalms 86, 103, and 145 — is widely acknowledged in the scholarly literature.
Yashuv in Micah 7:19
Reading yashuv as an independent "He will return, He will have compassion again" — with God as the acting subject who turns back toward us — rather than merely adverbial "again," is a defensible choice supported in the scholarly literature, but it remains a choice; the adverbial reading is a real counter-voice.
The structural observations (the "seal of thirty-seven")
Wherever the book points to the equal length of Exodus 34:6-7 and Micah 7:18-20 (both thirty-seven graphic words), to their meaningful middle word, and to colon-counts around the number eleven, the same threefold rule applies throughout: the countable fact is well documented, its interpretation is a weighed reading, and the why remains speculative. The word "proven" does not fit here. These findings are meant as an occasion for wonder, never as evidence in a case.
God's deep feeling and unchangeableness
The relationship between God's deep feeling and His unchangeableness is worked out in the Excursus "A wounded God who does not change?" (Part II). The position taken there — "unchangeable" as steadfast rather than motionless; the distinction between what moves God from within and what happens to a human being from without; the classic doctrine of accommodation, in which God speaks in human images to make Himself understood — stands within the broad Christian tradition. It draws on Calvin's notion of accommodation (Institutes I.13.1: God "lisps" with us as a nurse does with a small child), on recent work on divine emotion such as that of Rob Lister, and, for the Old Testament image of God, on H.G.L. Peels' insight that God is "no abstraction, no sum of attributes" but "a Thou."
Literature (brief)
This list is illustrative, not exhaustive; it names the works on which the strongest choices rest.
C.J. Labuschagne, The Incomparability of Yahweh in the Old Testament (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1966; Pretoria Oriental Series V).
H.G.L. Peels, Wie is als Gij? Schaduwkanten van het oudtestamentische Godsbeeld [Who Is Like You? The Shadow Sides of the Old Testament Image of God] (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2007).
Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, The Meaning of Hesed in the Hebrew Bible: A New Inquiry (Harvard Semitic Monographs 17; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978).
Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013). Text editions and reference works: the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Nestle-Aland for the source text; the standard dictionaries and grammars of biblical Hebrew and Greek for the philological choices.