Deuteronomy 29:28

Summary

The verse describes Yehovah uprooting the people from their land in intense anger and casting them into another land, a situation described as continuing "as this day" (or "until this day").

Key words

• yitteshem ("he plucked up", H5428) — qal verb with narrative vav and 3mp suffix "them"; the root denotes tearing out or uprooting, applied here to removal from the land.
• Yehovah (H3068) — the subject of both main verbs in the sentence, named once and governing the whole action.
• af ("anger", H0639G), chemah ("rage", H2534), qetsef gadol ("great wrath", H7110A + H1419A) — three near-synonymous nouns joined by u-... u-... ("and... and..."), each governed by the preposition be ("in"), stacking three terms for anger under one verb.
• yashlichem ("he threw out", H7993) — hiphil (causative) verb with narrative vav and 3mp suffix "them"; the hiphil stem marks Yehovah as causing the action of throwing, distinct from the plainer qal yitteshem.
• ka-yom ha-zeh ("as this day", H9004+H3117L+H9009+H2088) — a fixed idiom combining preposition, noun "day", article, and demonstrative "this", used to mark a state of affairs as observable at the time of speaking.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two parallel narrative clauses, each opened by va- ("and then") attached to a verb, both taking Yehovah as subject and "them" as object via pronominal suffix. The first clause, va-yitteshem Yehovah me-'al admatam ("and Yehovah plucked them up from upon their land"), uses the qal stem yitteshem (H5428), a verb associated with uprooting or tearing away. This action is qualified by three stacked nouns for anger — af (H0639G), chemah (H2534), and qetsef gadol (H7110A + H1419A, "great wrath") — each introduced by the preposition be ("in"), producing a cumulative intensification rather than three distinct actions.

The second clause, va-yashlichem 'el 'erets acheret ("and he threw them into another land"), shifts to the hiphil stem yashlichem (H7993), a causative form indicating that Yehovah caused the throwing/casting to happen, distinguishing it grammatically from the first verb's plainer qal action. The clause closes with the idiom ka-yom ha-zeh ("as this day", H2088), which in Hebrew narrative marks a state that persists at the time of the statement, without a verb of its own — the idiom itself carries the sense of ongoing continuation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yitteshem as ἐξῆρεν ("he removed/took away") and adds the intensifier σφόδρα ("exceedingly") to the third anger term, a word not present in the Hebrew's qetsef gadol. The Vulgate translates ka-yom ha-zeh as "sicut hodie comprobatur" ("as is proven/confirmed today"), introducing an explicit verb ("comprobatur") where the Hebrew idiom has no verb, only the phrase "as this day". The BSB similarly expands the idiom into "where they are today," supplying a verb and pronoun absent from the Hebrew's brief comparative phrase.