Deuteronomy 30:15

Summary

Moses commands the people to see/recognize that Yehovah has set before them, on this day, two paired sets of realities: life and good, and death and evil. The verse functions as the introduction to the choice laid out in the following verses of Deuteronomy 30.

Key words

• re'eh ("see", H7200) — qal imperative, masculine singular; a direct command to perceive or pay attention, addressed to the people as a collective "you."
• natati ("I set/I have given", H5414) — qal perfect, first person; describes a completed action, framing what follows as something already established, not merely proposed.
• lefaneikha ("before you", H6440 + H9021) — construct noun panim ("face") with second-person masculine singular suffix, forming the idiomatic "before your face," i.e., "in front of you."
• ha-chayyim ("the life", H2416) — masculine plural noun with definite article; plural form though referring to a singular concept, a common pattern for this noun.
• ha-ra ("the evil", H7451) — masculine singular adjective with definite article, paired as the final term of the four listed.

What the text says

The verse opens with two verbs in sequence without a conjunction: re'eh ("see") followed by natati ("I have set"). The first is an imperative addressed to the listener; the second is a completed-action perfect verb attributed grammatically to an unstated first-person subject (contextually Yehovah, based on the wider passage). This construction presents the imperative almost as an interjection — "See!" — followed by a declarative statement of a prior act.

The phrase lefaneikha ha-yom ("before you, this day") locates the object of the perception spatially and temporally: something has been placed physically "before the face" of the addressee, and the moment is marked as "the day" (ha-yom, H3117), i.e., the present occasion of speaking.

The object of natati is introduced four times with the untranslated object marker 'et, each time attached to a definite noun or adjective: ha-chayyim ("the life"), ha-tov ("the good"), ha-mavet ("the death"), ha-ra ("the evil"). The repeated use of 'et before each term, rather than a single marker governing all four, gives each noun/adjective equal grammatical weight as a distinct object of the verb, rather than treating them as a single combined phrase. The Hebrew groups them in two pairs: life-and-good, then death-and-evil, joined by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002) between each item.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Ἰδοὺ δέδωκα... τὴν ζωὴν καὶ τὸν θάνατον, τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ τὸ κακόν) reorders the four terms as life-death-good-evil, rather than the Hebrew's life-good-death-evil sequence. The Vulgate (vitam et bonum, et e contrario mortem et malum) follows the Hebrew order but inserts e contrario ("on the other hand"), a phrase with no corresponding element in the Hebrew text, marking the contrast explicitly where the Hebrew relies only on the conjunction ve.