Deuteronomy 2:7

Summary

Moses tells the people that Yehovah their God has blessed them in all their labor and has known their journey through the great wilderness. For forty years Yehovah has been with them, and they have lacked nothing.

Key words

• berakh'kha ("he has blessed you", H1288) — piel perfect, an intensive completed action, with the pronominal suffix "you" attached directly to the verb.
• yada' ("he has known", H3045) — qal perfect of the same root used elsewhere for intimate knowledge; here paired with an infinitive to describe ongoing accompaniment.
• lekhet'kha ("your walking", H1980G) — qal infinitive with pronominal suffix, functioning as the object of yada', literally "he has known your walking."
• midbar ("wilderness", H4057B) — masculine singular noun, definite, modified twice by the article plus the adjective gadol ("great", H1419A) and the demonstrative zeh ("this", H2088).
• chasarta ("you have lacked", H2637) — qal perfect second person, negated by lo' ("not", H3808), closing the verse with a completed-state statement.

What the text says

The verse divides into two parallel statements joined by the particle ki ("for/that", H3588A). The first states that Yehovah 'elohekha ("your God", H0430G construct + suffix) has blessed (berakh'kha) "in all the work of your hand" (bekhol ma'aseh yadekha), a chain of construct nouns (khol, ma'aseh, yad) each governing the next, culminating in the possessive suffix "your." The second statement uses yada' ("he has known") with the infinitive lekhet'kha ("your walking") as its object — a construction where the verb of knowing takes an action-noun (infinitive) as its complement, expressing that Yehovah has known/attended to the people's movement through "the wilderness, the great, the this" (hammidbar haggadol hazzeh), where the article is repeated on the noun, the adjective, and the demonstrative, a common Hebrew pattern for stacking definite modifiers.

The phrase zeh arba'im shanah ("this forty years", H2088 + H0705 + H8141) uses the demonstrative zeh adverbially to mark a span of time ("these forty years"), followed by the repeated formula Yehovah 'elohekha 'immakh ("Yehovah your God with you", H5973A), a simple prepositional clause without a verb, stating presence. The verse ends with lo' chasarta davar ("you have not lacked a thing"), a qal perfect negated by lo', with davar ("thing/word", H1697I) functioning here as "anything."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders hammidbar haggadol hazzeh with an added qualifier, "great and fearful" (τὴν μεγάλην καὶ τὴν φοβερὰν), where the Hebrew has only gadol ("great") without a term corresponding to "fearful." The LXX also reads "διάγνωθι" ("know/discern") as an imperative directed at the listener, whereas the Hebrew yada' is a third-person perfect ("he has known"), describing Yehovah's action rather than commanding the addressee. The Vulgate's novit iter tuum ("he has known your way") and habitans tecum ("dwelling with you") both follow the Hebrew's structure of yada' + journey and 'immakh ("with you") respectively, though habitans ("dwelling") supplies a participle not explicit in the Hebrew's simple prepositional phrase 'immakh.