Deuteronomy 31:17

Summary

The verse describes Yehovah's anger igniting against the people on a future day, followed by his abandonment and the hiding of his face, resulting in disasters. The text ends with the people's own rhetorical question, admitting these calamities came because "God" was no longer in their midst.

Key words

• chara ("it will burn", H2734) — qal sequential perfect, third masculine singular; continues a chain of future actions initiated by a preceding verb form.
• 'aph ("anger", H0639) — masculine singular construct noun, bound to the suffix -i ("my"), literally "anger of me."
• panai ("my face", H6440) — plural construct noun (grammatically plural though referring to a single face), bound to -i ("my").
• 'eloha ("God", H0430) — masculine plural construct noun (a plural form used for the singular referent "God"), bound to -i ("my") in the phrase 'elohai ("my God").
• qirbi ("my midst", H7130) — masculine singular construct noun with suffix -i, forming be-qirbi ("in my midst").

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects (chara, 'azavti, histarti, hayah, matze'u, 'amar) — a grammatical pattern where each verb, though morphologically perfect, functions as a future action linked to the ones before it. This creates a cumulative sequence: anger burns, then abandonment, then hidden face, then consumption, then the arrival of calamities, then speech. The construct chains ('appi, panai, 'elohai, qirbi) attach first-person singular suffixes directly onto nouns, a feature Hebrew uses instead of separate possessive words.

The closing rhetorical question is introduced by ha-lo' ("is it not," H9008+H3808), a combination of the interrogative particle and negation that expects an affirmative answer. The clause ki-'ein 'elohai be-qirbi ("that there is no my-God in my midst") uses 'ein (H0369), a construct-form negative existential noun, to deny presence rather than negating a verb directly — a distinct Hebrew existential-negation structure with no single-word English equivalent.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text of word 6 (bo, "in him/it") uses a third-person singular suffix, which the LXX renders as αὐτοὺς (plural, "them") and the Vulgate as eum (singular, "him"). Modern translations like BSB and SBLIBRE render this collectively as "them"/"ellos," diverging from the Hebrew's grammatical singular.

The closing phrase 'elohai ("my God," singular speaker) and qirbi ("my midst," singular) appear in first person singular in the Hebrew and Vulgate (Deus mecum, "God with me"), while RV1909 preserves the singular ("mi Dios," "de mí"), but SBLIBRE shifts to plural ("nuestro Dios," "nosotros"), reflecting a translational choice not present in the Hebrew's grammatical number.