Deuteronomy 10:4

Summary

The verse describes the writing of a second set of stone tablets, said to match the first, containing the "ten words" that Yehovah had spoken from the mountain during the assembly. It concludes by noting that Yehovah gave these tablets to the speaker (Moses, in the narrative context).

Key words

• yikhTov ("he wrote", H3789) — qal narrative verb; the subject "he" is not named by a noun in this clause, only implied by verb agreement, leaving open who performs the writing.
• luchot ("tablets", H3871) — feminine plural noun, referring to the stone tablets onto which the writing is placed.
• 'aseret ha-devarim ("[the] ten... words", H6235/H1697) — construct chain, literally "ten of the words," the direct object marked by 'et (H0853).
• diBer ("he had spoken", H1696) — piel perfect, an intensive/completed verbal form describing Yehovah's prior act of speaking these words at the mountain.
• qahal ("assembly", H6951) — masculine singular noun, defining the specific "day" (yom, H3117) on which the words were originally spoken.

What the text says

The sentence opens with a narrative vav-consecutive verb, yikhTov ("and he wrote," H3789), whose grammatical subject is only "he" — the noun Yehovah (H3068) does not appear until later in the sentence, attached instead to the verb diBer ("he had spoken," H1696) describing the earlier speech at the mountain, and again at the end with yitTenem ("he gave them," H5414). Because Hebrew narrative verbs carry subject information in their conjugation rather than requiring a separate pronoun, the identity of "he" in "he wrote" must be inferred from the larger narrative rather than stated explicitly in this clause.

The object of the writing is 'et 'aseret ha-devarim — "the ten of the words" (H6235/H1697), a construct phrase where "ten" governs "the words," producing the sense "the ten words." This phrase is further modified by the relative clause 'asher diBer Yehovah 'aleikhem ("which Yehovah had spoken to you," H0834A/H1696/H3068), using the piel perfect to mark this speaking as a completed prior event relative to the writing. The setting is specified twice: spatially, "on the mountain, from the middle of the fire" (ba-har mi-tokh ha-'esh, H2022/H8432/H0784), and temporally, "on the day of the assembly" (be-yom ha-qahal, H3117/H6951). The final clause, va-yitTenem Yehovah 'elai ("and Yehovah gave them to me," H5414/H3068/H0413), explicitly names Yehovah as the one who transfers the tablets to the first-person speaker.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew leaves the subject of yikhTov ("he wrote") grammatically implicit, recoverable only from context. The BSB translation makes this explicit by inserting "the LORD" as the subject of "wrote" at the start of the sentence, whereas the Hebrew word order places Yehovah's name only later, attached to the verbs "had spoken" and "gave." The LXX (ἔγραψεν, "he wrote") and Vulgate (Scripsit, "he wrote") similarly use an unspecified third-person verb without naming a subject at that point, matching the Hebrew's grammatical ambiguity more closely than the BSB's explicit insertion.