Deuteronomy 18:17

Summary

Yehovah responds to Moses, affirming that the people's speech (referenced in the preceding verses) was good. The sentence is short and direct, consisting of a divine speech-formula followed by a brief evaluative statement.

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — narrative vav + qal verb, marking the next event in the reported dialogue; standard formula introducing divine speech.
• Yehovah (H3068G) — the divine name, subject of the verb yomer.
• elai ("to me", H0413) — preposition with 1st person suffix, identifying Moses as the recipient of the speech, without any other addressee named.
• heitivu ("they have done well", H3190) — hiphil (causative) perfect, 3rd person plural: the causative stem here conveys "to do/act well," with the perfect aspect marking the action as completed.
• dibberu ("they have spoken", H1696G) — piel (intensive) perfect, 3rd person plural: the piel stem intensifies the basic root "to speak," and the relative clause it closes explains what was "done well."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure is compact: a narrative clause (va-yomer Yehovah elai, "and Yehovah said to me") is followed by a two-word evaluative clause, heitivu asher dibberu — literally "they have done well, [in] that which they have spoken." The relative particle asher ("that which", H0834A) links the verb heitivu to the content clause dibberu, so the object of approval is not a person but an act of speaking previously reported.

Both verbs are perfect in aspect, presenting the "doing well" and the "speaking" as completed actions rather than ongoing ones. The use of the hiphil for heitivu frames the evaluation causatively — the people's action is described as having "caused good" or "done rightly" — while the piel of dibberu intensifies the verb "to speak," suggesting the speaking act referred to was significant or emphatic rather than casual. The Hebrew does not specify to whom the people spoke; the clause simply states "that which they spoke," leaving the addressee to be inferred from context.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the evaluative clause as Ὀρθῶς πάντα ὅσα ἐλάλησαν πρὸς σέ ("rightly, all that they said to you"), adding both "all" (πάντα) and an explicit addressee, "to you" (πρὸς σέ), neither of which appears in the Hebrew text given. The Vulgate similarly adds "all" (omnia) in "Bene omnia sunt locuti" ("they have spoken all things well"), matching the LXX's addition of totality but, like the Hebrew, not specifying an addressee. The Hebrew itself states only heitivu asher dibberu, without the quantifier "all" or a named recipient of the speech.