Deuteronomy 1:20

Summary

Moses recounts to the Israelites that he told them they had reached the hill country of the Amorites, land that Yehovah their God was giving them. The verse functions as a narrative link, reporting Moses' earlier words within his ongoing speech.

Key words

• 'omar ("I said", H0559) — qal narrative form, marking the report of a past speech-act within the ongoing story ("and then I said").
• ba.Tem ("you have come", H0935) — qal perfect, 2nd person masculine plural, denoting a completed action: the arrival is presented as already accomplished at the moment of speaking.
• har ("hill country of", H2022) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linking directly to "the Amorite" to form "hill country of the Amorite."
• 'e.mo.Ri ("Amorite", H0567) — gentilic singular noun, used collectively to denote the people group associated with the hill country.
• no.Ten ("is about to give", H5414) — qal participle, masculine singular, expressing an ongoing or imminent action ("the one giving"), not a completed gift but a continuing/announced provision.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav attached to 'omar ("I said"), a common device in Biblical Hebrew narrative to advance the sequence of reported events: "and I said to you." The content of the speech follows directly, introduced without a formal quotation marker beyond the verb itself. The first clause of the quoted speech, ba.Tem ("you have come"), uses the perfect aspect to present the arrival at the Amorite hill country as a completed fact from the speaker's viewpoint, even though grammatically the perfect in Hebrew narrative can also carry a resultative sense ("you have reached/are now at").

The construct chain har ha-'Emori ("hill country of the Amorite") ties the geographical term tightly to the ethnic label, a common construct pattern in Hebrew where the first noun receives its definiteness from the article on the second. The relative clause introduced by 'asher ("which") modifies this hill country, specifying it as the land that Yehovah 'elohei-nu ("Yehovah our God") is giving. The verb here, no.Ten, is a participle rather than a perfect or imperfect verb, which in Hebrew often marks an action in progress, imminent, or characteristic — here suggesting the giving is presented as an ongoing or soon-to-be-realized act rather than a single completed event.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew and Vulgate both use a first-person plural pronoun for the recipient of the land — Hebrew lanu ("to us") and Vulgate nobis ("to us"). The LXX (Swete text), however, reads δίδωσιν ὑμῖν ("gives to you," second person plural), differing from the Hebrew's first-person form. Additionally, the LXX clause "καὶ εἶπα πρὸς" appears to lack an explicit object where the Hebrew has 'alekhem ("to you"), a structural gap visible in the transmitted Greek text as given.