Deuteronomy 32:27

Summary

This verse presents Yehovah's own reasoning (within the divine speech of the Song of Moses) for withholding full punishment: fear that the enemy would misread Israel's defeat as their own military triumph rather than as Yehovah's judgment. The verse ends with the quoted boast the enemy might make and its negation.

Key words

• lulei ("if not", H3884) — introduces a contrary-to-fact conditional, framing the whole verse as a hypothetical restraint on divine action.
• agur ("I was afraid", H1481C) — grammatically a qal imperfect (denoting ongoing/future action) but glossed with past sense "I was afraid," reflecting how Biblical Hebrew imperfect forms can carry durative or modal nuance beyond simple future tense.
• yenakeru ("they should misconstrue", H5234B) — a piel (intensive) imperfect; the piel stem intensifies the act of "making foreign/strange," i.e., willfully misinterpreting.
• yadei ("hands", H3027H) — dual construct form ("hands of"), paired with the suffix nu ("our", H9025) to form "our hands," yet governing a singular feminine verb.
• ramah ("it was raised", H7311A) — qal perfect (completed action), agreeing grammatically as feminine singular, treating "hand" as a collective image of triumph rather than two literal hands.

What the text says

The sentence opens with lulei ("if not") plus ka'as ("provocation of," H3708A, construct) governing 'oyev ("enemy," H0341, a qal participle functioning as a noun — "the one provoking/an enemy"). This construct chain, "provocation of an enemy," is the object of the fear expressed by agur. The clause structure is: "If not for [fear of] the enemy's provocation, I was afraid..." — a rhetorical suspension typical of poetic Hebrew, where the protasis (the "if not" clause) precedes its own justification.

Two parallel pen ("lest," H6435) clauses follow, each introducing a feared outcome: first that the "opponents" (tzarei, H6862C, construct plural + suffix mo, H9028, "their") would "misconstrue" (yenakeru), and second that they would "say" (yomeru, qal imperfect, H0559) the specific boast: "our hand[s] (yadeinu) is raised (ramah)." The dual noun yadei concludes here with a singular feminine verb ramah, a common poetic pattern where a body-part dual functions as a singular image of collective strength. The verse closes with the negated claim: ve lo Yehovah pa'al kol zot — "and not Yehovah did all this" — using the qal perfect pa'al ("he did," H6466) to state, in the voice attributed to the enemy, a denial of Yehovah's action, which the divine speaker anticipates and rejects by voicing it hypothetically.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders agur ("I was afraid") with "distuli" ("I have delayed"), introducing a nuance of postponement not explicit in the Hebrew verb of fear. The LXX (Swete) reads "ἵνα μὴ μακροχρονίσωσιν" ("that they might not prolong [days]"), a phrase without a direct lexical counterpart in the Hebrew pen yenakeru tzareimo ("lest their opponents misconstrue"), showing a structural divergence in how the second clause's content is expressed. The Hebrew's construct phrase ka'as 'oyev ("provocation of an enemy") differs from the LXX's "ὀργὴν ἐχθρῶν" ("wrath of enemies") and the Vulgate's "iram inimicorum" ("wrath of enemies"), both of which shift the semantic focus from the enemy's provocative reaction toward the enemy's own wrath.