Deuteronomy 29:2

Summary

Moses summons all Israel and reminds them that they themselves witnessed everything Yehovah did in Egypt against Pharaoh, his officials, and his land. The verse opens a speech built on direct eyewitness testimony as its rhetorical foundation.

Key words

• va-yikra ("and he summoned", H7121G) — narrative vav + qal verb, marking the next event in the story sequence; introduces Moses as the one who calls the assembly.
• atem ("you", H0859D) — independent personal pronoun, emphatic since Hebrew verbs already encode person; its presence stresses the addressees themselves as agents of seeing.
• re'item ("you have seen", H7200G) — qal perfect, denoting a completed act of perception, placing the audience's own experience prior to the speech itself.
• le-'einei-khem ("to your eyes", H5869J + H9026) — construct noun with dual form and pronominal suffix, literally "eyes" in pair, used adverbially to mean "before your eyes."
• asher 'asah ("that he did", H0834A + H6213A) — relative clause with qal perfect verb, subordinating the description of Yehovah's acts to the object "all that."

What the text says

The verse is structured in two narrative clauses joined by va- ("and"): first va-yikra ("and he summoned") with Moses as subject and "all Israel" (kol Yisra'el) as object marked by the preposition 'el ("to"); then va-yomer ("and he said") introducing direct speech aimed 'alehem ("to them"). The speech itself begins with the emphatic pronoun atem ("you"), which is grammatically redundant since the verb re'item already carries the second-person plural marking — its inclusion foregrounds the addressees as the ones who saw, not merely heard about, these events.

The object of seeing is introduced by 'et, the untranslated direct-object marker, followed by the phrase kol 'asher 'asah Yehovah ("all that Yehovah did"), a relative clause using the qal perfect 'asah to denote a completed divine action. The phrase le-'einei-khem ("to your eyes"), built on the dual noun 'einayim ("eyes") in construct with the suffix "your," functions idiomatically to mean "before your eyes" or "with your own eyes," reinforcing the direct-witness theme already carried by atem. The location is specified by be-'eretz Mitzrayim ("in the land of Egypt"), and the recipients of Yehovah's action are listed in a chain of construct phrases: le-Far'oh ("to Pharaoh"), u-le-khol 'avadav ("and to all his servants"), u-le-khol artzo ("and to all his land"), each linked by the conjunction u- ("and") and the preposition le- ("to").

Differences between versions

The LXX renders kol Yisra'el ("all Israel") as "πάντας τοὺς υἱοὺς Ἰσραὴλ" ("all the sons of Israel"), adding "sons" not explicit in the Hebrew construct phrase. Where the Hebrew has le-'einei-khem ("to your eyes"), the LXX uses "ἐνώπιον ὑμῶν" ("before you"), and the Vulgate similarly renders it "coram vobis" ("before you"), both losing the specific "eyes" imagery present in the Hebrew dual noun 'einayim (H5869J).