Deuteronomy 1:41

Summary

This verse records the people's spoken response to Moses: they confess having sinned against Yehovah, declare their resolve to go up and fight as commanded, and then arm themselves — but the narrative closes by noting that they treated going up into the hill country as something easy.

Key words

• chata'nu ("we have sinned", H2398) — qal perfect, marking the confession as a completed act, opening their direct speech.
• na'aleh ("we will go up", H5927G) — qal imperfect, expressing intended or future action, the first of the paired resolutions.
• nilchamnu ("we will fight", H3898A) — niphal sequential perfect, continuing the imperfect na'aleh in the same declared resolve ("we will go up and fight").
• tzivvanu ("he has commanded us", H6680) — piel perfect, an intensive form stressing the binding nature of Yehovah's command that they invoke to justify their plan.
• tahinu ("you regarded as easy", H1951) — hiphil narrative form, a causative verb meaning literally "you made [it] light/easy," used here to characterize their attitude toward the ascent.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — ta'anu ("you answered"), tomru ("you said"), tachgeru ("you girded on"), tahinu ("you regarded as easy") — which form the backbone of the reported sequence of events. Embedded inside this chain is the people's direct speech, itself built from a perfect (chata'nu, a completed confession) followed by an imperfect (na'aleh) and a sequential perfect (nilchamnu), together expressing intention: "we have sinned... we will go up and we will fight."

The clause ka-khol 'asher tzivvanu Yehovah Eloheinu ("according to all that Yehovah our God has commanded us") anchors their stated resolve to the divine command, using the construct form Elohei ("God of", H0430G) to bind the divine title to the suffixed "us." The final verb, tahinu (hiphil of H1951), stands apart from the confessional and martial vocabulary that precedes it: rather than another action verb in the chain, it evaluates the people's disposition toward the act of going up (la-'alot, infinitive H5927G with prefixed preposition), describing it as something they treated lightly.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew tahinu ("you regarded as easy") carries a nuance of presumption not clearly rendered in the LXX or Vulgate. The LXX has συναθροισθέντες ἀνεβαίνετε ("having gathered together, you went up"), which describes a gathering-and-ascending action but omits any sense of treating the ascent as easy. The Vulgate similarly reads Cumque instructi armis pergeretis in montem ("and when, equipped with arms, you proceeded into the mountain"), again omitting the evaluative nuance of the hiphil verb. Among the modern renderings supplied, the BSB — "thinking it easy to go up into the hill country" — reflects this causative sense most directly.