‘Kill in Death?’
Revelation 2:23 says, literally:
‘the children her I-will-kill in death‘
That sounds quite odd, doesn’t it? What does killing in death mean?
Many Bibles translate it something like this:
‘I’m going to kill her children with plague‘
Why? Well, it seems that there is an idiom in Greek where ‘death’ is a general term for plague or disease. You just have to infer it from the context. Also, the Hebrew word for ‘plague’ is translated as ‘death’ in the Septuagint, such as at Jeremiah 14:12.
However, we have to be careful, because it’s not obvious that the idiom is present here. Nothing specific to suggest ‘plague’ is mentioned, and adding such a specific reference to plagues could encourage some more intensive readers into viewing it as a clue for some kind of time-connection with other plagues in Revelation — when no such reference really exists. We’d be making an assumption and then inserting it into the text.
So what’s the solution? How should we translate the awkward phrase?
Well, the word for ‘I-will-kill’ (αποκτενω) can also mean ‘I-will-condemn’. So the simplest solution is ‘I-will-condemn in death’, or as we say in English, ‘condemn to death’.
That’s why we translate it as:
‘I’m also going to condemn her children to death’
If correct, this is talking about them being judged and condemned to execution at a future time, it’s not referring to the execution itself.
And it still leaves the door open to it being a possible reference to killing with plagues, if that’s how one wishes to interpret it.