Deuteronomy 2:16

Summary

Deuteronomy 2:16 marks a narrative transition, stating that the moment came when all the men of war among the people had completely finished dying off. The verse functions as a temporal hinge, closing one phase of the wilderness narrative before the text moves to what follows.

Key words

• va-yehi ("and it was", H9001 + H1961) — the narrative vav attached to the qal verb "to be" is a standard Hebrew formula opening a new narrative unit, often untranslatable literally but signaling "and then it came to pass."
• ka'asher ("just when", H0834D) — a relative particle here functioning temporally, introducing the circumstance under which the main clause occurs.
• tammu ("they had finished", H8552) — qal perfect, third person plural, denoting a completed action; the men's dying is presented as a finished process, not ongoing.
• lamut ("to die", H4191) — infinitive with the preposition la, expressing purpose or result attached to tammu: "finished... to die," i.e., finished dying.
• qerev ("midst of", H7130G) — construct noun meaning "midst," combined with min ("from") to express "from the midst of," locating the men within the larger body of "the people."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around two verbs describing a single event from complementary angles: tammu ("they had finished," H8552) and lamut ("to die," H4191). This construction — a finite verb followed by an infinitive with la — is a common Hebrew way of expressing that an action reached its completion: literally "they finished to die," rendered idiomatically as "they had finished dying" or "had died off completely." The subject of this finishing is kol-anshei ha-milchamah ("all the men of the war," H3605 + H0582 + H4421), a construct chain identifying a specific subset of the larger group.

The phrase mi-qerev ha-am ("from the midst of the people," H7130G + H5971A) specifies that these men were removed from within the larger collective body called "the people." The preposition min combined with qerev conveys separation or extraction — the fighting men are singled out as having vanished specifically from among this wider group, rather than being an event affecting the group as a whole.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tammu ("they had finished," H8552) with diepesan ("fell" or "perished"), and adds apothnēskontes ("dying," present participle) to represent the sense of the Hebrew infinitive lamut, producing "fell... dying" rather than the Hebrew's "finished to die." The Vulgate condenses the construction further with ceciderunt ("they fell"), omitting the separate notion of completion (tammu) and merging it into the single verb "fell." The Hebrew's two-part expression of completed dying is thus represented differently: Hebrew emphasizes finality through two verbs, while LXX and Vulgate compress this into single verbs of falling or dying.