Deuteronomy 13:7

Summary

This verse fragment lists categories of foreign deities Israel is warned against following: gods belonging to the peoples surrounding them, whether those peoples are near or far, extending across the whole inhabited world. The phrase functions as a merism expressing totality — "from one end of the earth to the other."

Key words

• 'elohei ("gods of", H0430J) — masculine plural construct, opening a genitive chain: "gods of the peoples."
• ha'ammim ("the peoples", H5971A) — definite plural, the nations surrounding Israel, source of the foreign gods.
• sevivoteichem ("around you", H5439G) — feminine plural construct with 2nd person plural suffix, describing the peoples' geographic position relative to the addressees.
• haqqerovim ("the near", H7138) and harechoqim ("the distant", H7350) — both definite masculine plural adjectives, forming a paired contrast (near/far) modifying the peoples just mentioned.
• qetzeh ha'aretz ("end of the earth", H7097A + H0776G) — construct noun repeated twice, forming a merism for the entire world.

What the text says

The Hebrew builds a chain of qualifications onto "gods": first a construct phrase me'elohei ha'ammim ("from the gods of the peoples"), then a relative clause introduced by 'asher ("which/who", H0834A) specifying that these peoples are sevivoteichem ("around you"). The next clause splits those surrounding peoples into two groups using matched definite adjectives — haqqerovim 'eleicha ("the near ones, to you") 'o harechoqim mimmecha ("or the far ones, from you") — each adjective governing its own prepositional phrase ('elecha, "to you"; mimmecha, "from you") to express relative distance from the addressee.

The final clause, miqtzeh ha'aretz ve'ad qetzeh ha'aretz ("from the end of the earth and to the end of the earth"), repeats the identical noun qetzeh ("end of", H7097A) twice with the same construct form ha'aretz ("the earth", H0776G), producing a symmetrical merism. This repetition of identical vocabulary on both sides of the phrase is the grammatical device by which totality — "everywhere" — is expressed, rather than through an abstract term for "all" or "everywhere."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew's symmetrical merism qetzeh ha'aretz... qetzeh ha'aretz ("end of the earth... end of the earth") uses the same word twice. The LXX preserves this symmetry with ἄκρου τῆς γῆς repeated. The Vulgate instead renders it asymmetrically as ab initio usque ad finem terrae ("from the beginning to the end of the earth"), replacing the second occurrence of "end" with a different pair of terms (initio/finem), which changes the merism from spatial repetition to a beginning/end pairing.