Deuteronomy 3:17

Summary

This verse continues the boundary description of the territory given to the tribes east of the Jordan, listing the Arabah, the Jordan, and the border running from Kinnereth to the Sea of the Arabah (also called the Salt Sea), reaching to the slopes below Pisgah on the eastern side.

Key words

• ha'Aravah ("the Arabah", H6160G) — definite noun naming the geographical depression; it appears twice in the verse, once alone and once in a construct phrase (yam ha'Aravah, "sea of the Arabah").
• gevul ("a border", H1366G) — masculine singular noun, here functioning as the head of the boundary description that follows (min...ve'ad, "from...to").
• yam ("sea of", H3220G) — construct form appearing twice in sequence (yam ha'Aravah, yam hamelach), stacking two identifications of the same body of water.
• ashdot ("slopes of", H0798) — feminine plural construct noun, grammatically linking to happisgah ("the Pisgah") as "slopes of the Pisgah."
• mizrachah ("east" + directional he, H4217H/H9011) — the noun "east" carries a suffixed directional marker (-ah), indicating motion or orientation "toward the east" rather than simply naming the direction.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is a list of geographical terms connected by ve ("and", H9002), naming the Arabah and the Jordan as landmarks, then introducing gevul ("border") as the subject of a boundary clause running mikinneret ("from Kinnereth", H3672G) ve'ad ("and to", H5704) yam ha'Aravah ("the sea of the Arabah"). This same sea is then re-identified through a second construct phrase, yam hamelach ("Sea of the Salt", i.e., "the Salt Sea"), placed in apposition without a connecting conjunction — the Hebrew simply juxtaposes the two names for the same body of water.

The final clause, tachat ashdot happisgah mizrachah, uses a chain of construct nouns: tachat ("under", H8478G) governs ashdot ("slopes of"), which governs happisgah ("the Pisgah"). The directional he on mizrachah is a grammatical feature attaching orientation directly to the noun "east," a construction not reproduced by simple prepositions like "to the east" in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX text supplied begins with an additional clause, "ὁ χειμάρρους ὅριον τοῖς υἱοῖς Ἀμμάν" ("the ravine, a border to the sons of Ammon"), which has no counterpart in the Hebrew or the Vulgate text given here. The LXX also renders the phrase corresponding to mikinneret as "ὅριον Μαχανάρεθ" ("border of Machanareth"), differing from the simple place-name Kinneret (H3672G) in the Hebrew.