Deuteronomy 30:2

Summary

Deuteronomy 30:2 describes a return: the addressee (and his children) turns back to Yehovah his God and listens to his voice, in full accordance with the commandments given "today," and does so with the totality of heart and being.

Key words

• shavTa ("you will turn back", H7725) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the verbal chain begun in the preceding verse; the subject is marked by the verb form itself before being restated later by atah.
• shama'Ta ("you will listen", H8085) — qal sequential perfect, parallel in form to shavTa, linking "returning" and "listening" as two steps of the same sequence.
• qoL ("voice", H6963) — masculine singular construct, bound to the following suffix o ("his"), forming "his voice."
• levav ("heart", H3824) — masculine singular construct, bound to kha ("your"), inside the phrase be-khol levavkha ("with all your heart").
• nephesh ("being/soul", H5315) — feminine singular construct, bound to kha, paired with levav in the formula "with all your heart and all your nephesh."

What the text says

The verse is built as two sequential perfect verbs — shavTa ("you will turn back") and shama'Ta ("you will listen") — both continuing a narrative chain that began earlier in the passage (marked by the ve- prefix, H9001, "narrative vav"). Each verb already carries the second-person masculine singular subject in its suffix, so grammatically "you" is complete without a separate pronoun. Yet the text adds atah u-vaneicha ("you and your children", H0859A + H1121A) after the object clause "all that I command you today," making explicit that the subject of shavTa and shama'Ta extends beyond the singular addressee to include "your children" as well. This construction — verb-encoded subject followed by an explicit appositional restatement — is a feature the English and Latin renderings must resolve differently, since they cannot leave the subject implicit in the verb the way Hebrew does.

The clause "according to all that I am commanding you today" uses a construct chain (kol asher, H3605 + H0834A) governed by the participle metzavve ("commanding", H6680, piel), which grammatically functions as a bound noun ("the one commanding you"), giving the sense of an ongoing, present act of commanding rather than a completed one. The closing phrase be-khol levavkha u-ve-khol naphshekha repeats the construct pattern khol + noun + suffix twice, pairing "heart" and "being" under the same intensifying "all," a stock double expression for totality of person.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders Yehovah eloheikha ("Yehovah your God", H3068+H0430G) simply as ad eum ("to him"), omitting the divine name and title present in the Hebrew and in the LXX's κύριον τὸν θεόν σου. The LXX and Vulgate also place "you and your sons" (ἐξ ὅλης... / cum filiis tuis) differently relative to the verbs than the Hebrew's positioning after "today," though the same elements are all present.