Deuteronomy 18:9

Summary

The verse introduces a prohibition tied to entry into the land: once the addressee enters the land that Yehovah is giving, he is instructed not to learn to act according to the abominations of the nations that were there. It functions as a transitional clause setting up the following list of forbidden practices (vv. 10-14).

Key words

• ba ("[have] gone", H0935G) — qal participle, describing an ongoing/imminent action: "you [are] entering/going into."
• noten ("[is] about to give", H5414G) — qal participle, parallel to ba, presenting Yehovah's giving as a present/continuing action rather than a completed one.
• til'mad ("you will learn", H3925H) — qal imperfect, expressing future or habitual action; the negation lo ("not", H3808) placed before it forms the prohibition.
• la'asot ("to do", H6213A) — infinitive construct with prefixed le- ("to"), completing the verb til'mad: "learn to do."
• to'avot ("abominations of", H8441) — feminine plural construct noun, grammatically bound to ha-goyim ("the nations", H1471A), forming the phrase "abominations of the nations."

What the text says

The sentence opens with the conditional/subordinating particle ki ("if/that", H3588A), followed by the pronoun 'atah ("you", H0859A) and the participle ba ("[have] gone", H0935G). This construction — pronoun plus participle — presents the action of entering the land not as a hypothetical single event but as an ongoing or imminent situation: "you are entering." The relative clause that follows, introduced by 'asher ("which", H0834A), identifies "the land" (ha-'aretz, H0776G) as the one that Yehovah 'eloheikha ("Yehovah your God") is giving, again using a participle (noten, H5414G) rather than a finite verb, which keeps the giving in the same continuous aspect as the entering.

The main clause begins with lo ("not", H3808) directly negating til'mad ("you will learn", H3925H), a qal imperfect verb. The imperfect here carries a prohibitive or future-negative sense: the addressee is told not to learn. This verb is completed by the infinitive la'asot ("to do", H6213A), forming the compound idea "you will not learn to do." What follows specifies what is not to be done: ka-to'avot ("according to the abominations of", H8441, in construct with ha-goyim, "the nations", H1471A). The construct chain to'avot ha-goyim ("abominations of the nations") is further qualified by the demonstrative ha-hem ("those", H1992), pointing to nations already mentioned or implied in context, translated as "those nations."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew participle construction with a subjunctive conditional (Ἐὰν... εἰσέλθῃς, "if you should enter"), shifting the aspectual nuance of ba ("[have] gone", H0935G) toward a hypothetical condition rather than an ongoing/imminent action. The Vulgate similarly uses a temporal clause ("Quando ingressus fueris," "when you shall have entered") and adds an imperative "cave" ("beware"), which is not present in the Hebrew verb til'mad ("you will learn", H3925H) but functions as an interpretive expansion of the prohibition. The Hebrew lo-til'mad la'asot ("you will not learn to do") is rendered in the LXX as οὐ μαθήσῃ ποιεῖν ("you will not learn to do"), closely matching the Hebrew verbal structure, while the Vulgate's "cave ne imitari velis" ("beware lest you wish to imitate") reframes the construction as a warning against desiring imitation, rather than a direct prohibition on learning.