Deuteronomy 1:29

Summary

Deuteronomy 1:29 records Moses recounting his own words to the people, urging them not to be terrified or afraid of the enemies they were facing. The verse uses two parallel negative commands, both intensified by a paragogic nun, to reinforce the exhortation.

Key words

• 'oMar ("I said", H0559) — qal narrative verb, first person, marking the continuation of Moses' retelling of past events ("and then I said").
• ta'arTzu ("you must be terrified", H6206) — qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, expressing an ongoing or future prohibited action.
• n (paragogic nun, H9013) — emphatic suffix attached to the verb, adding rhetorical weight to the command without changing its core meaning.
• tir'U ("you must be afraid", H3372G) — qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, parallel in form and function to ta'arTzu.
• Hem ("them", H9038) — pronominal suffix attached to the preposition me ("from", H9006), indicating the source of the feared threat.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav (va, H9001) attached to 'oMar ("I said", H0559), a construction typical of Hebrew narrative sequence, signaling that this is a continuation of Moses' speech recalling a past moment. The phrase 'ale-Khem ("to you", H0413 + H9036) identifies the audience as the people collectively, using a second person masculine plural suffix.

The core prohibition consists of two parallel clauses: lo'-ta'arTzun ("you must not be terrified") and ve-lo'-tir'Un ("and you must not be afraid"). Both verbs are qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, and both carry the paragogic nun (H9013), an archaic or emphatic verbal ending that Biblical Hebrew sometimes adds to imperfect forms, particularly in poetic or heightened rhetorical contexts. This doubling of near-synonymous verbs (ta'arTzu, "be terrified", and tir'U, "be afraid") with matching grammatical intensification creates a structural parallelism that reinforces the force of the command through repetition rather than through a single strong verb.

The final phrase, me-Hem ("from them", H9006 + H9038), specifies the object of the feared threat using a prepositional phrase rather than a direct object, a construction consistent with the verbs 'arats (H6206) and yare' (H3372G), which in Hebrew typically govern "fear from" rather than "fear of" in a directly transitive sense.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two Hebrew verbs ta'arTzu and tir'U with πτήξητε ("cower/be terrified") and φοβηθῆτε ("be afraid"), preserving the double prohibition structure. The Vulgate uses metuere ("to fear/dread") and timeatis ("you should fear"), also maintaining two verbs, though metuere and timeatis are closer synonyms in Latin than the Hebrew pair, which uses two distinct roots (H6206 and H3372G) for slightly different shades of fear.