1. This holds true even though Israel was not at that time living in territorial and political independence. It is one of the strange characteristic of Israel then, and since, that whatever their political circumstances, they always considered themselves a "nation apart."

2. B. K. Waltke, with Charles Yu, An Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006) 405, n1. Transliteration simply spells out the sound of the original word in the translation without replacing it with a word of similar meaning in the language of the translation. In other words, Waltke suggests that we use the word torah instead of the word law which imports into the word concepts foreign to it.