Deuteronomy 11:24

Summary

The verse defines the extent of the territory Israel will receive: every place touched by their feet will belong to them, with borders running from the wilderness and Lebanon to the Euphrates River, and westward to the sea.

Key words

• tidrokh ("it will tread", H1869) — qal imperfect, third-person feminine singular; the subject is not "you" but kaf ("sole"), a feminine noun, so the verb grammatically agrees with "sole," not with the people.
• kaf-raglekhem ("sole of your foot", H3709H/H7272) — a construct chain: "sole" governs "foot," which carries the second-person masculine plural suffix khem (H9026), producing "the sole of your foot."
• lakhem ("to you", H9005+H9036) — preposition le plus pronominal suffix, forming a dative-of-possession phrase that precedes the verb yihyeh.
• yihyeh ("it will belong/will be", H1961) — qal imperfect third-person masculine singular, used twice in the verse (once for possession, once for the border), each time with "place" or "territory" as its grammatical subject.
• gevulkhem ("your territory", H1366H+H9026) — construct noun with second-person plural suffix, naming the final subject of the second clause.

What the text says

The sentence opens with kol-hammaqom ("every place", H3605+H4725), introduced by the relative particle asher (H0834A), which sets up a conditional-like clause: "every place that the sole of your foot treads on it." The verb tidrokh takes kaf ("sole") as its grammatical subject, so the Hebrew construction technically attributes the treading to the "sole of the foot" rather than to the people directly, even though the practical meaning is the same. The clause ends with bo ("in it", H9033), a pronominal suffix referring back to hammaqom ("the place"), and then lakhem yihyeh — "to you it will be" — placing the dative pronoun before the verb, a common Hebrew word order for expressing possession.

The second half of the verse lists boundary markers using a chain of min ("from", H4480A) and ad ("to", H5704) prepositions: from hammidbar ("the wilderness", H4057B) and hallevanon ("Lebanon", H3844G), from hannahar nehar-perat ("the River, the river of Euphrates" — an appositional doubling naming the river explicitly), to hayyam ha'acharon ("the western sea", H3220G+H0314). The clause closes with yihyeh gevulkhem ("it will be your territory"), mirroring the syntax of the first clause but with gevul ("border/territory") as the subject.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders hallevanon as "Ἀντιλιβάνου" (Antilebanon), a more specific mountain-range name than the Hebrew hallevanon ("Lebanon"). Both the LXX ("τοῦ ποταμοῦ τοῦ μεγάλου," "the great river") and the Vulgate ("flumine magno," "the great river") add the qualifier "great" to the Euphrates, a word not present in the Hebrew word list for this verse.