Deuteronomy 28:63

Summary

The verse describes a reversal: just as Yehovah once rejoiced in doing good to the people and multiplying them, he will now rejoice in destroying and annihilating them. The passage closes with the people being torn from the land they are entering to possess.

Key words

• sas ("he rejoiced", H7797) — qal perfect, a completed past action; sets up the comparison as the "as" side of the "just as... so" construction.
• yaSis ("he will rejoice", H7797) — same root as sas, but qal imperfect (future/ongoing); the identical verb root used for both blessing and destruction creates the parallel structure of the verse.
• harBot ("to increase", H7235A) — hiphil (causative) infinitive; expresses Yehovah as the causal agent making the people multiply, paired with lehetiv ("to do good", H3190) in the first half.
• haAvid ("destroy", H0006) — hiphil infinitive, causative "cause to perish"; paired with a second synonym hashMid ("destroy", H8045) in the second half, doubling the vocabulary of destruction.
• nissachTem ("you will be torn away", H5255) — niphal (passive) sequential perfect; shifts the grammatical subject from Yehovah acting upon the people to the people undergoing the action, marking the transition to their resulting fate.

What the text says

The Hebrew builds a deliberate symmetry using the phrase ka'asher... ken ("just as... so"). The first half states that Yehovah sas ("rejoiced," H7797, qal perfect) 'aleikhem ("over/upon you") lehetiv 'etkhem ("to do good to you") and ulharbot 'etkhem ("and to increase you") — two hiphil infinitives describing benefit and growth. The second half mirrors this exactly in form: Yehovah yasis ("will rejoice," same root, now imperfect) 'aleikhem, but the purpose infinitives change to lehaavid 'etkhem ("to destroy you") and ulhashmid 'etkhem ("and to destroy you"), using two different hiphil verbs of destruction where the first half had used two verbs of blessing. This repetition of the same verb root (sus/sis) for rejoicing in both blessing and destruction, without change in meaning, is a grammatical feature that plain translation glosses cannot always preserve, since some versions render the two occurrences with different English/Spanish words while the Hebrew keeps a single root.

After this two-part comparison, the verb form shifts from active hiphil (Yehovah as causer) to niphal passive (nissachtem, "you will be torn away"), marking the people as the ones acted upon rather than agents. The clause closes with a qal participle va ("about to go," H0935G) and infinitive rishtah ("to possess it," H3423H), describing the land as one they are in the process of entering to possess.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders both Hebrew destruction verbs (haavid and hashmid) with a single Greek verb, ἐξολεθρεῦσαι ("to utterly destroy"), collapsing the Hebrew's double vocabulary into one term. The Vulgate instead preserves two expressions, "disperdens... atque subvertens" ("destroying... and overturning"), corresponding more closely to the two Hebrew infinitives. The LXX also adds ἐν τάχει ("quickly") before "from the land," a phrase with no equivalent in the Hebrew word list provided.