Deuteronomy 32:10

Summary

The verse describes four successive actions performed toward an unnamed masculine object ("him"): finding him in a wilderness region described with three overlapping terms, then surrounding, attending to, and guarding him, compared at the end to the protection of the pupil of an eye.

Key words

• yim.tza.'Ehu ("he found him", H4672) — qal imperfect with 3rd person suffix; a simple, non-intensive verb marking the initial encounter.
• tohu ("a wasteland of", H8414) — masculine singular construct, linked to yelel ("howling of", H3214) and yeshimon ("a desolate place", H3452H), forming a three-word construct chain that piles up terms for emptiness and desolation.
• ye.soe.Venhu ("he surrounded him", H5437) — piel (intensive) imperfect with suffix; the doubled-stem form intensifies the notion of encircling compared to a simple qal.
• ye.Vonenhu ("he took care of him", H0995) — piel imperfect with suffix; again an intensive stem, describing sustained attentive action rather than a single act.
• ishon ("[the] pupil of", H0380) — masculine singular construct joined to eino ("his eye", H5869A+H9023), forming the fixed idiom "pupil of his eye" used as a comparison for the final verb's guarding.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence chains four verbs, each carrying the same 3rd person masculine object suffix hu ("him"/"it", H9033), so the same referent is found, surrounded, attended to, and guarded. The first verb, yim.tza.'Ehu ("he found him"), is a plain qal form, while the next two, ye.soe.Venhu ("he surrounded him") and ye.Vonenhu ("he took care of him"), are in the piel stem, which in Biblical Hebrew often marks intensified or repeated action compared to the simple qal. The final verb, yi.tze.Renhu ("he guarded him"), returns to the qal stem, closing the sequence with a plain guarding action rather than an intensified one.

The location where the finding occurs is described through a stack of construct nouns: 'Eretz midbar ("a land of wilderness"), followed by tohu yelel yeshimon ("a wasteland of howling of a desolate place"). This construct chain accumulates near-synonyms for emptiness and desolation rather than naming a single specific place, producing a dense, layered description of the terrain in the source language that a single translated phrase cannot fully replicate. The closing comparison, ke-ishon eino ("like the pupil of his eye"), uses a fixed idiomatic construct pairing to characterize the manner of the final guarding action.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the wilderness description as "ἐν δίψει καύματος, ἐν γῇ ἀνύδρῳ" ("in thirst of heat, in a waterless land"), which diverges from the Hebrew's stacked terms midbar, tohu, yelel, yeshimon focused on emptiness and howling rather than thirst and heat. For ye.Vonenhu ("he took care of him", H0995), the LXX has "ἐπαίδευσεν" ("he instructed/disciplined") and the Vulgate has "docuit" ("he taught"), both differing from the "took care of" sense given in the Hebrew gloss. The Vulgate's "in loco horroris, et vastæ solitudinis" also condenses the three-part construct chain of the Hebrew into two descriptive phrases.