Deuteronomy 29:24

Summary

The verse depicts foreign nations asking a rhetorical question about the devastation of the land, attributing it to an action of Yehovah motivated by intense anger. The sentence is structured as two parallel questions: one about the cause of the destruction, another about the nature of the anger behind it.

Key words

• 'a.me.Ru ("they will say", H0559) — qal perfect, sequential form continuing the narrative chain; grammatically marks the nations' speech as a foreseen, completed future event within the sequence.
• ha.go.Yim ("the nations", H1471A) — masculine plural noun with definite article, preceded by kol ("all", H3605) in construct state, producing "all the nations" as the subject of the speech-verb.
• 'a.Sah ("has done", H6213A) — qal perfect, third person masculine singular, describing Yehovah's action as a completed act being questioned.
• cho.Ri ("heat of", H2750) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linking grammatically to ha.'Af ("the anger", H0639G) to form the phrase "heat of the anger."
• ha.ga.Dol ("the great", H1419A) — adjective with article, agreeing with ha.'Af ("the anger"), intensifying the noun it modifies.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative vav on 'a.me.Ru, continuing a sequence of reported speech attributed to kol-ha.go.Yim ("all the nations"). The first question uses the interrogative meh ("what?", H4100) with the preposition 'al ("concerning", H5921A), producing a construction close to "concerning what has he done thus" — asking about the cause behind Yehovah's action toward ha.'Aretz ha.Zot ("this land").

The second question repeats meh but shifts to a construct-chain structure: cho.Ri ha.'Af ha.ga.Dol ha.Zeh, literally "the heat of the anger, the great, the this" — a construct noun (cho.Ri, "heat of") governing ha.'Af ("the anger"), with two demonstrative and adjectival elements piled onto "anger" for emphasis. This construct chain intensifies the description of anger through a doubled qualifier: it is not simply "anger" but "the heat of the anger," further marked as "great" and specified as "this" one, pointing back to the events just described in the land.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the second question as τίς ὁ θυμὸς τῆς ὀργῆς ("what is the wrath of the anger"), using two separate Greek nouns (θυμός, ὀργή) to represent the Hebrew construct chain cho.Ri ha.'Af, where Hebrew uses one noun in construct governing another. The Vulgate similarly separates the components as "ira furoris eius immensa" ("this immense fury of his wrath"), adding "eius" (his) and "immensa" (immense) not explicitly present as separate words in the Hebrew, where intensity is conveyed instead through the construct chain and the double demonstrative-adjective sequence (ha.ga.Dol, ha.Zeh).