Deuteronomy 10:19

Summary

Deuteronomy 10:19 instructs the addressees, in the plural, to love the ger ("sojourner", H1616), grounding this instruction in the fact that they themselves had been gerim ("sojourners", H1616) in the land of Egypt. The verse links a command to a shared past experience through the causal particle ki ("for", H3588A).

Key words

• 'a.hav.Tem ("you will love", H0157G) — qal sequential perfect, 2nd person masculine plural; continues the narrative sequence from the preceding verses, functioning here as an instruction directed at the group.
• Ger ("sojourner", H1616) — masculine singular noun with the definite article ha ("the", H9009), marking a specific category of person: the resident foreigner.
• ki ("for", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the reason clause; can mark causation ("for/because") or, in other contexts, condition ("if/that").
• ge.Rim ("sojourners", H1616) — same root as word 5, now plural, describing the addressees' own former status.
• he.yi.Tem ("you were", H1961) — qal perfect, 2nd person masculine plural, describing a completed past state, contrasted with the present instruction expressed by the sequential perfect in word 2.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative vav va ("and", H9001) attached to 'a.hav.Tem, a sequential perfect that carries forward a chain of instructions begun earlier in the passage. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) introduces the object of the verb without adding independent meaning, followed by ha.Ger, "the sojourner," singular with the definite article — grammatically singular but functioning generically to denote the category of resident foreigner as a class.

The second clause is introduced by ki, which here functions causally, connecting the command to a stated fact about the addressees' history: ge.Rim he.yi.Tem be-'Eretz Mitzrayim, "sojourners you were in the land of Egypt." The plural ge.Rim matches the plural subject implied by he.yi.Tem ("you were," 2nd masculine plural), so the grammatical number shifts from singular (the generic ha.Ger) to plural (the addressees themselves as former gerim). The noun 'Eretz (H0776G) appears in construct form, "land of," bound to the proper name Mitzrayim ("Egypt", H4714G), producing the fixed phrase "land of Egypt." The perfect he.yi.Tem marks a completed past state, distinguished morphologically from the sequential perfect 'a.hav.Tem, which expresses the ongoing force of the instruction in its narrative chain.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders ki with quia et ipsi ("because they themselves"), adding ipsi ("themselves") as an emphatic element not present as a separate word in the Hebrew, where the emphasis is carried only by the verb form he.yi.Tem. The LXX uses gar ("for") for ki, matching its causal sense directly, and renders ha.Ger with the singular ton prosēlyton ("the proselyte/sojourner"), while ge.Rim becomes the plural prosēlytoi, preserving the Hebrew's singular/plural distinction between the generic category and the addressees' own former status.