Deuteronomy 1:35

Summary

Moses declares that no man among the present generation of Israelites will see the good land that Yehovah swore to give to their ancestors. The verse uses an oath-formula construction where a conditional particle functions as an emphatic negative, and it closes the section describing the exclusion of that generation from the promised land.

Key words

• 'im ("if", H0518) — Normally introduces a conditional clause, but combined with an imperfect verb in oath contexts it functions idiomatically as a strong negation ("surely not"), explaining why translations render it as a flat denial rather than a hypothetical.
• yir'eh ("he will see", H7200) — Qal imperfect third person masculine singular; grammatically future/ongoing, it is the verb whose negation (via 'im) produces the sense "will not see."
• 'et (untranslated object marker, H0853) — Marks ha'aretz ("the land") as the direct object of the infinitive tet ("to give"); it carries no independent meaning and is not rendered in translation.
• nishba'ti ("I swore", H7650) — Niphal perfect first person singular; the niphal stem here carries a reflexive/passive nuance associated with oath-taking, and the perfect aspect marks the swearing as a completed past act.
• 'avoteikhem ("your fathers", H0001+H9026) — Construct plural noun with second-person plural suffix, anchoring the oath's beneficiaries as "your ancestors," i.e., the audience's own forefathers rather than a third party.

What the text says

The clause opens with 'im followed by the imperfect yir'eh, a syntactic pattern typical of Hebrew oath language: what looks like a conditional ("if he will see") functions instead as an emphatic negative assertion ("he will surely not see"). The subject is 'ish ("anyone", H0376) restricted by the prepositional phrase ba-'anashim ha-'elleh ("among these men", H0582/H0428), further specified by the appositional phrase ha-dor ha-ra' ha-zeh ("this evil generation", H1755/H7451/H2088) — three demonstrative-laden phrases stacking to emphasize precisely which group is excluded.

The object of the (negated) seeing is ha-'aretz ha-tovah ("the good land", H0776/H2896), introduced by the untranslated marker 'et. This land is further defined by the relative clause 'asher nishba'ti latet la-'avoteikhem ("which I swore to give to your fathers"), where the niphal perfect nishba'ti frames Yehovah's earlier oath as a completed, binding act, and the infinitive tet ("to give", H5414) expresses the content of that oath.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) renders the phrase compactly as "τῶν ἀνδρῶν τούτων" ("of these men"), without an explicit equivalent for ha-dor ha-ra' ha-zeh ("this evil generation"), while the Hebrew and the Vulgate ("generationis hujus pessimæ") both retain the generational designation, with the Vulgate intensifying ra' ("evil") to a superlative ("most evil"). Additionally, the Hebrew la-'avoteikhem ("to your fathers", second-person plural) appears in the LXX as "τοῖς πατράσιν αὐτῶν" ("to their fathers", third-person plural), a shift in grammatical person not present in the Hebrew or the Vulgate ("patribus vestris", "your fathers").