Deuteronomy 1:14

Summary

The verse reports the people's response to a prior proposal: they answered Moses and declared that the davar ("word/thing", H1697I) he had spoken was good to carry out. It is a narrative report using two sequential past-tense verbs followed by a quoted statement of approval.

Key words

• ta'anu ("you answered", H6030B) — qal narrative form (vav + prefix conjugation), 2nd person masculine plural, marking a sequential past action: "and then you answered."
• to'meru ("you said", H0559) — same narrative pattern, introducing the direct quotation that follows.
• tov ("[is] good", H2896A) — a bare adjective placed at the head of the quoted clause, functioning as a predicate before its subject.
• dibbarta ("you have spoken", H1696G) — piel perfect, 2nd person masculine singular; the piel stem here carries the sense of formal or intensified speech ("you have spoken/declared"), completed prior to the moment of quotation.
• la'asot ("to do", H6213A) — qal infinitive with the preposition la ("to", H9005), expressing purpose or the content of the action referenced ("...to do").

What the text says

The verse consists of two narrative-vav clauses (va-ta'anu, va-to'meru) reporting sequential actions — "and you answered me, and you said" — followed by direct speech. The quoted speech itself is a nominal (verbless) sentence: tov ha-davar ("good [is] the word/thing"), with the predicate adjective tov placed before the definite subject ha-davar, a common word order in Hebrew for such declarative statements. This subject is further specified by a relative clause, asher dibbarta la'asot ("which you spoke to do"), where the piel perfect dibbarta denotes the prior act of speaking and the infinitive la'asot indicates the action's content — what was spoken about doing. The direct object marker 'oti ("me", H0853+H9030) in the first clause shows Moses as the recipient of the people's answer, but does not appear grammatically in the second clause, which shifts directly to quoted speech.

Differences between versions

The LXX (ἐλάλησας ... ποιῆσαι, "you spoke ... to do") closely mirrors the Hebrew's dibbarta ... la'asot structure. The Vulgate departs more noticeably, rendering the relative clause as quam vis facere ("which you wish to do"), replacing the verb "to speak" (completed past act) with "to wish" (a present desire), thus shifting the nuance from a report of a completed statement to an expression of intent. The Spanish and English translations (BSB, SBLIBRE) follow the Hebrew's sense of a prior spoken proposal rather than the Vulgate's "wish."