Deuteronomy 1:3

Summary

Deuteronomy 1:3 dates the speech that follows: in the fortieth year, eleventh month, first day of the month, Moses spoke to the people of Israel everything that Yehovah had commanded him concerning them. The verse functions as a narrative introduction, anchoring Moses' discourse in a specific calendrical moment.

Key words

• va-yehi ("and it was", H1961) — narrative vav plus qal verb; the standard formula opening a narrated event, setting a temporal frame ("and it came to pass that...").
• 'ar.ba.'im ("forty", H705) — plural noun marking the year count; combined with shanah ("year", H8141) it fixes the chronological setting.
• diber ("he spoke", H1696G) — piel perfect of the verb for speaking, denoting a completed, deliberate act of address rather than casual talk.
• tzivah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, parallel in form to diber; it marks the commanding as prior and completed relative to the speaking.
• 'oto ("him", H853 + suffix) — direct object marker with pronominal suffix, showing that Yehovah's command was given directly to Moses himself, before Moses relayed it 'alehem ("to them", H413 + suffix) — the people.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative formula va-yehi ("and it was"), a construction that in Biblical Hebrew regularly introduces a time-marked episode. What follows is a chain of prepositional phrases built with be- ("in/on", H9003): "in forty year," "in eleven-ten month," "on one to-the-month" — literally stacking the year, the month, and the day of the month before the main clause verb appears. Only after this triple temporal anchor does the main verb diber ("he spoke") arrive, with Moses as subject and bnei Yisra'el ("sons/people of Israel", construct + H3478) as the addressee marked by 'el ("to", H413).

The clause continues with a comparative ke-khol 'asher ("according to all that", H9004 + H3605 + H834A), introducing a subordinate clause whose verb, tzivah ("he had commanded"), is also a piel perfect — the same stem-form as diber. This creates a grammatical parallel between Moses' act of speaking and Yehovah's prior act of commanding, even though the two events are sequential in time (command first, then speech). The object of the command is marked twice: 'oto ("him", direct object with suffix) shows the command was given to Moses personally, and 'alehem ("to them") shows its ultimate direction toward the people — a structure that keeps Moses as intermediary between the divine command and its human recipients.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate adds a purpose clause, "ut diceret eis" ("that he might tell them"), for the Hebrew 'alehem ("to them"), making explicit a relaying function that the Hebrew phrase leaves implicit through simple prepositional attachment. The LXX renders bnei Yisra'el as "πάντας υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ" ("all the sons of Israel"), inserting "all" (πάντας) where the Hebrew construct bnei Yisra'el has no equivalent quantifier. The LXX also uses "κύριος" ("Lord") where the Hebrew has the tetragrammaton Yehovah (H3068G).