Deuteronomy 28:64

Summary

The verse describes Yehovah scattering the people among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other, where they will serve unfamiliar gods made of wood and stone. It closes a sequence of covenant-curse warnings using consecutive verb forms that present these events as a continuous chain of consequence.

Key words

• he.fi.tze ("he will scatter", H6327A) — hiphil causative form of the verb, indicating Yehovah as the active agent causing the dispersion, in sequential perfect form linking it to preceding curses.
• 'a.Vad.ta ("you will serve", H5647H) — qal sequential perfect, second person, continuing the same narrative chain: after scattering comes servitude.
• 'E.lo.Him 'a.che.Rim ("gods", H0430J + "other", H0312) — plural noun with plural adjective, the standard construction for foreign deities in this corpus.
• ya.Da'.ta ("you have known", H3045) — qal perfect (simple completed action, not sequential), marking a shift from the ongoing curse-sequence to a statement of prior fact: neither the addressee nor the ancestors had prior knowledge of these gods.
• 'etz ("wood", H6086G) and 'A.ven ("stone", H0068G) — two bare singular nouns appended without a preposition, standing in apposition to describe the material of the "other gods."

What the text says

The verse is built on two sequential perfect verbs — he.fi.tze ("he will scatter") and 'a.Vad.ta ("you will serve") — both introduced by the narrative vav (ve, H9001), which chains them to the preceding curses as consequences that follow in sequence. The subject of the first verb is Yehovah (H3068G), explicit in the Hebrew, while the second verb shifts to second-person address without repeating the subject, since the sequential form itself carries the addressee ("you") as its built-in subject via the verb pattern.

The geographic phrase mi-k.Tzeh ha-'A.retz ve-'ad-ke.Tzeh ha-'A.retz ("from the end of the earth and to the end of the earth") uses two construct nouns k.Tzeh/ke.Tzeh ("end of", H7097A) governing ha-'A.retz ("the earth", H0776G), a repeated construct structure that expresses totality of geographic range rather than two distinct places.

The final clause names the objects of worship: 'E.lo.Him 'a.che.Rim ("other gods"), followed by a relative clause 'a.Sher lo'-ya.Da'.ta ("which you have not known") using the simple (non-sequential) perfect ya.Da'.ta, marking this as background information rather than a further event in the sequence. The nouns 'etz ("wood") and 'A.ven ("stone") appear at the very end without connecting syntax to "gods," standing in apposition — describing the material composition of these deities.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'etz ("wood") and 'A.ven ("stone") as ξύλοις καὶ λίθοις ("to woods and to stones"), placing them in the dative alongside θεοῖς ἑτέροις ("other gods"), making the material explicitly instrumental/appositional to "gods" in Greek syntax, whereas the Hebrew simply appends the two nouns at the clause's end without an explicit connector to 'E.lo.Him 'a.che.Rim. The Vulgate follows a similar appositional pattern with lignis et lapidibus ("with woods and stones") at the very end of the sentence, matching the LXX's syntactic placement rather than the Hebrew's terminal apposition.