Deuteronomy 32:34

Summary

The verse is a rhetorical question posed in the first person: the speaker asks whether something (referred to only by the pronoun hu) is not already kept in reserve, secured among a set of storehouses belonging to that same speaker. The syntax presents this as an obvious "yes" through the double negative-interrogative construction.

Key words

• hu ("[is] that / it", H1931) — third-person pronoun functioning as the grammatical subject of the sentence; it refers back to something in the preceding context but is not itself named here.
• kaMus ("stored up", H3647) — Qal passive participle, masculine singular; describes a state of having been laid away, agreeing with hu.
• 'immaDi ("with me", H5973A + H9030) — preposition with 1st-person singular suffix; locates the stored object at the speaker's own side.
• chaTum ("sealed up", H2856) — Qal passive participle, masculine singular, parallel to kaMus, adding the nuance of closure/security under seal.
• 'otzroTai ("my storehouses", H0214 + H9020) — feminine plural noun in construct form with 1st-person suffix; the plural indicates multiple repositories, all possessed by the speaker.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the compound interrogative ha ("¿", H9008) plus the negation lo ("not", H3808), a standard Hebrew construction that turns a statement into a rhetorical question expecting an affirmative answer — "Is it not the case that...?" The subject hu is minimal, a bare pronoun, meaning the referent must be supplied from context outside this verse; within the verse itself no noun specifies what "it" is.

The predicate is built from two parallel passive participles, kaMus and chaTum, both describing the same subject hu in a state of being kept and sealed. The parallelism is reinforced by the two prepositional phrases that follow each participle: 'immaDi ("with me") after kaMus, and be-'otzroTai ("in my storehouses") after chaTum. This produces a balanced two-part structure: "stored up — with me / sealed — in my storehouses," where the second phrase intensifies and specifies the first (from general presence "with me" to the more concrete image of sealed containers). The plural construct 'otzroTai suggests more than one storehouse, though the text does not indicate their content beyond what "it" (hu) refers to.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the subject as ταῦτα ("these things," plural neuter demonstrative) where the Hebrew has the singular pronoun hu; it also inserts ἰδοὺ ("behold") with no direct match in the Hebrew line. The Vulgate follows the LXX's plural demonstrative with haec ("these things") rather than reflecting the Hebrew's singular hu. Both LXX (συνῆκται, "has been gathered/collected") and Vulgate (condita sunt, "have been laid up") interpret kaMus with a sense of gathering/storing that broadly parallels the Hebrew participle but do not preserve its passive-participle form as sharply as the Hebrew text does.