Deuteronomy 1:19

Summary

Moses recounts the departure from Horeb and the journey through the great and terrifying wilderness toward the hill country of the Amorites, in obedience to Yehovah's command, ending at Kadesh-barnea. The verse frames the trek as both a geographical description and a fulfillment of divine instruction.

Key words

• ni.Sa' ("we set out", H5265) — qal narrative form, first-person plural, marking the initiating action in the chain of past events.
• mid.Bar ("wilderness", H4057B) — masculine singular noun, modified by two definite adjectives (ga.dOl, "great", H1419A; no.Ra', "awesome", H3372G) forming a stacked description of the terrain.
• re.'i.Tem ("you saw", H7200G) — qal perfect, second-person plural, shifting the narrative voice to address the audience directly as witnesses.
• tzi.Vah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, third-person masculine singular, an intensive verb stem denoting a formal, authoritative command.
• na.Vo' ("we came", H0935G) — qal narrative form, first-person plural, closing the sequence of movement verbs that began with ni.Sa'.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chain of three narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — ni.Sa' ("we set out"), Ne.lekh ("we walked"), and na.Vo' ("we came") — which sequentially advance the storyline: departure, traversal, arrival. Between the second and third verbs, the text inserts a long descriptive and causal expansion. The object of the walking is marked by 'et (H0853, untranslated object marker) before kol-ha.mid.Bar ("all the wilderness"), itself qualified by two adjectives with repeated definite articles — ha.ga.dOl ("the great") and ha.no.Ra' ("the awesome") — followed by the demonstrative ha.Hu' ("that"), producing a formal, almost legal-sounding designation: "that great and awesome wilderness."

A relative clause, 'a.Sher re.'i.Tem ("which you saw"), shifts briefly into direct address to the audience using the qal perfect second-person plural, reminding the listeners that they themselves witnessed this terrain. The phrase De.rekh har ha.'e.mo.Ri ("the way of the hill country of the Amorite") uses two construct nouns in sequence to specify the route's destination. The clause ka.'a.Sher tzi.Vah Yehovah 'e.lo.Hei.nu 'o.Ta.nu ("just as Yehovah our God had commanded us") uses the piel perfect tzi.Vah, an intensive stem for "command," followed by the object marker 'o.Ta.nu ("us") — explicitly framing the entire journey as an act carried out under prior divine instruction rather than autonomous choice. The final clause returns to narrative sequence with na.Vo', bringing the sentence to rest at the place name Ka.Desh Bar.Ne.a'.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate restructure the Hebrew's word order: both place the clause about Yehovah's command before or integrated differently relative to the wilderness description, whereas the Hebrew narrative sequence sets tzi.Vah ("he commanded") near the end, right before the final arrival verb. The BSB follows this LXX/Vulgate-style reordering, placing "just as the LORD our God had commanded us" at the beginning of the English sentence rather than in its Hebrew position. The Vulgate also splits the verse differently, ending the sentence at "our God" and beginning a new clause with "Cumque venissemus" ("and when we came"), separating the arrival at Kadesh-barnea into the following verse's syntax rather than keeping it within the same continuous chain as the Hebrew's va.na.Vo'.