Deuteronomy 1:8

Summary

Moses reports Yehovah's command: the land has already been granted, and the people are told to enter and take possession of it. The verse grounds this command in the oath Yehovah swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give the land to them and their descendants.

Key words

• re'Eh ("see", H7200) — Qal imperative, singular masculine, opening command directed at one addressee.
• na.Ta.ti ("I set/have given", H5414) — Qal perfect, first person; a completed action framed as already accomplished even though possession is still future.
• bo.'U / re.Shu ("go" / "take possession of", H0935/H3423) — Qal imperatives, plural masculine, shifting the addressee from singular to the whole community.
• nish.Ba' ("he swore", H7650) — Niphal perfect, third person masculine singular; the passive/reflexive stem marks a self-binding oath by the subject.
• zar.'A-m ("their offspring", H2233) — masculine singular noun in construct with a pronominal suffix, "seed of them," referring collectively to descendants.

What the text says

The verse opens with the singular imperative re'Eh ("see"), followed by the perfect verb na.Ta.ti ("I have given/set"). The perfect tense here does not describe a past event witnessed by the audience but presents the granting of the land as a settled, completed decision — a common use of the perfect in Hebrew for declarations treated as certain or already enacted. The direct object et-ha-'Aretz ("the land") is marked with the untranslated object marker 'et, and the phrase li-fnei-Khem ("before you," H6440 construct + suffix) literally means "to the face of you," a spatial idiom placing the land in full view of the addressees.

The command then shifts grammatically: Bo'u and re.Shu are plural imperatives ("go," "take possession"), addressing the collective group, in contrast to the singular re'Eh at the start. This grammatical shift from singular to plural imperative within the same verse reflects a movement from an individual address (traditionally understood as directed to Moses) to the assembled people.

The relative clause 'asher nishba' Yehovah ("which Yehovah swore") uses the Niphal perfect nish.Ba', a stem historically associated with self-oath language. The oath's recipients are listed individually — la-'avotei-Khem, le-'Avraham, le-Yitzchak, u-le-Ya'akov — each name preceded by its own preposition le ("to"), rather than joined only by conjunction, giving each patriarch separate emphasis. The purpose of the oath is expressed with the infinitive la-Tet ("to give"), followed by la-Hem ("to them") and u-le-zar'am 'acharei-hem ("and to their offspring after them"), extending the promise beyond the patriarchs to subsequent generations.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders re'Eh (singular "see") as idete (plural "see"), aligning the opening imperative with the plural imperatives that follow, whereas the Hebrew marks a grammatical shift from singular to plural within the verse. The LXX and Vulgate render na.Ta.ti ("I have given/set") as paradedoken ("has handed over") and tradidi ("I have handed over") respectively, both preserving the completed-action sense of the Hebrew perfect. The Vulgate's phrase "super qua juravit Dominus" ("concerning which the Lord swore") restructures the relative clause differently from the Hebrew's direct "'asher nishba' Yehovah" ("which Yehovah swore"), without altering the reported content of the oath.