Deuteronomy 31:16

Summary

Yehovah tells Moses that he is about to die ("lie down with his fathers") and predicts that after Moses's death, the people will turn to foreign gods once they enter the land, abandoning Yehovah and breaking the covenant he made with them.

Key words

• sho.Khev ("about to lie down", H7901G) — qal participle, expressing an imminent or ongoing action; here used idiomatically for approaching death.
• za.Nah ("it will act as a prostitute", H2181) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative chain begun with va.Yo.mer; used metaphorically for religious unfaithfulness.
• 'a.za.Va ("it will forsake", H5800A) — qal sequential perfect, first person suffix -ni ("me") attached, making Yehovah the direct object of abandonment.
• he.Fer ("it will break", H6565A) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, describing the causing of the covenant's failure, distinct from the simple qal verbs surrounding it.
• ka.Ra.ti ("I made/cut", H3772H) — qal perfect, first person; the underlying verb literally means "to cut," the standard Hebrew idiom for making a covenant (be.ri.T, H1285).

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of verbs joined by the narrative vav (H9001), which the grammar table marks as either introducing the speech (va.Yo.mer) or continuing the sequence of future events (Kam, za.Nah, 'a.za.Va, he.Fer). All four of these sequential perfects describe events that follow logically and temporally from Moses's death: the people "will arise" (Kam, H6965B), "will prostitute itself" (za.Nah), "will forsake" ('a.za.Va) Yehovah, and "will break" (he.Fer) the covenant. The switch from qal forms to the hiphil he.Fer marks a shift from describing unfaithful behavior to describing the causative destruction of a specific object, the covenant itself.

The phrase 'e.lo.Hei nekhar-ha'Aretz ("gods of the foreignness of the land", H0430J + H5236) uses a double construct chain, literally "gods of foreignness of the land," intensifying the sense of these deities as alien to Israel's own land and identity. The clause 'asher hu' va'-Shamah be-qirbo ("where it is about to go into its midst") uses the participle va' (H0935G) for imminent entry, paired with the directional -ah suffix on Shamah ("there/toward"), marking motion into the land as still future at the moment of speaking.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew closes with 'ito ("with him/it", H0854 + H9033), a singular suffix referring back to the collective ha'Am hazZeh ("this people," singular in Hebrew grammar). The Septuagint renders this as αὐτοῖς ("with them," plural), and the Spanish SBLIBRE follows this plural reading ("con ellos"), as does BSB ("with them"). The Vulgate preserves the singular, cum eo ("with him"), matching the Hebrew grammatical number more closely.