Deuteronomy 29:4

Summary

The verse states that Yehovah has not given the people a heart, eyes, or ears capable of, respectively, knowing, seeing, and hearing, up to the time being described ("this day"). It uses three paired body/organ terms with infinitive purposes to describe a lack of a particular kind of perceptive capacity.

Key words

• natan ("he has given", H5414G) — qal perfect, a completed action: the giving (or non-giving) is presented as a settled fact up to the reference point, not an ongoing process.
• lev ("a heart", H3820A) — singular noun; in this construction it is paired with the infinitive la'daat to express the purpose or capacity "to know."
• da'at ("to know", H3045) — qal infinitive with the preposition la ("to"), forming a purpose clause: "a heart to know," i.e., a heart with the function of knowing.
• 'einayim ("eyes", H5869A) — dual noun, grammatically marking a natural pair, paired with the infinitive lir'ot ("to see").
• 'oznayim ("ears", H0241G) — dual noun, paired with the infinitive lishmoa' ("to hear"), completing the triad heart/eyes/ears.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a single main verb, natan ("he has given", H5414G), negated by lo' ("not", H3808), with Yehovah as subject and "you" (masculine plural, encoded in the suffix khem on lakhem) as the recipient. This one verb governs three parallel objects — lev ("a heart"), 'einayim ("eyes"), 'oznayim ("ears") — each followed by a preposition la/li ("to") plus an infinitive: la'daat ("to know"), lir'ot ("to see"), lishmoa' ("to hear"). This produces a triple parallel structure: organ + purpose-infinitive, repeated three times, all depending on the same negated perfect verb.

The dual forms of 'einayim and 'oznayim simply reflect that eyes and ears are naturally paired organs in Hebrew grammar, not an emphasis added by the text itself. The infinitives do not specify an object (it does not say "to know what" or "to see what"); they denote a general capacity or faculty. The temporal phrase 'ad hayom hazeh ("until this day") closes the sentence, marking the endpoint up to which this state of not-having-been-given applies, using the perfect tense to frame it as a condition persisting through the reference point.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders Yehovah (H3068G) as κύριος ὁ θεὸς ("Lord God"), adding θεός where the Hebrew text has only the tetragrammaton. The Vulgate translates the infinitives adjectivally — "cor intelligens" ("understanding heart"), "oculos videntes" ("seeing eyes"), "aures quæ possunt audire" ("ears which are able to hear") — turning the Hebrew's purpose-infinitive construction into descriptive participial or relative-clause phrases rather than preserving the "to do" structure marked in the Hebrew grammar notes.