Deuteronomy 30:13

Summary

The verse continues a rhetorical denial: the commandment is not "beyond the sea," so there is no need for anyone to say "who will cross over the sea for us to get it, make it heard, and we can do it?" It rejects the idea that access to the commandment requires a difficult overseas journey.

Key words

• 'Ever ("other side / beyond", H5676H) — appears twice, once absolute (line 4) and once in construct (line 15, "the other side of the sea"), anchoring the spatial image of the far shore.
• ya'avor ("will he pass over", H5674A) — qal imperfect, built on the same root as 'Ever; the question asks who will "cross" to reach what is already described as "beyond."
• le'mor ("to say", H0559) — qal infinitive introducing the quoted rhetorical question that follows; it functions like an opening quotation mark in English.
• yikachena ("he may fetch it", H3947J) — qal imperfect with vav, carrying a 3rd-person feminine singular suffix ("her") referring back to the commandment; opens a three-verb purpose chain.
• na'asenah ("we may do it", H6213A) — final verb of that chain, imperfect 1st-person plural with the same feminine suffix, closing the sequence begun by yikachena.

What the text says

The clause opens with ve-lo' ("and not") plus a prepositional phrase built from me-'Ever la-Yam ("from beyond the sea"), followed by hi' ("it/she"), a feminine pronoun agreeing with the feminine noun for the commandment mentioned earlier in the passage. This sets up a denial: "it is not beyond the sea." The infinitive le'mor then introduces a hypothetical quoted question, built around mi... ya'avor ("who will cross over"), reusing the root of 'Ever to link the location ("the other side") with the action ("crossing over") — a wordplay visible in Hebrew but not preserved in translation.

After the question, three verbs connected by vav plus imperfect form a purpose chain: yikachena ("that he may fetch it"), yashmi'enu ("that he may make us hear it," hiphil, causative), and na'asenah ("that we may do it"). Each carries the feminine singular suffix "her/it," consistently referring to the same feminine antecedent throughout the chain, giving the sentence a tight grammatical cohesion that ties fetching, hearing, and doing to one single object.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate adds phrases not present in the Hebrow, such as "ut causeris, et dicas" ("that you might argue and say") and "quod praeceptum est" ("what has been commanded"), expanding the rhetorical framing beyond what the Hebrew infinitive le'mor alone supplies. The LXX renders the final verb na'asenah ("we may do it") with a future indicative (ποιήσομεν, "we will do") rather than a subjunctive, differing slightly from the purpose-chain sense carried by the Hebrew vav-imperfect forms.