Deuteronomy 32:37

Summary

The verse reports a future statement (introduced by a sequential form of "to say") in which an unnamed speaker challenges: where are the gods of a group described only by pronominal suffixes, the rock in which they had sought refuge. The Hebrew text does not name the speaker or the "they" — both must be inferred from the surrounding context.

Key words

• 'a.Mar ("he will say", H0559) — qal sequential perfect, continuing a narrative chain; grammatically it functions as a future/consequential action following the preceding verses.
• 'ei ("where?", H0335) — an interrogative particle opening a rhetorical question with no stated verb "to be"; the copula is supplied by the reader.
• 'e.lo.Hei.mo ("gods of them", H0430 + H9028) — a plural construct noun with a 3rd person plural possessive suffix; "gods" is grammatically plural, though the referent (the entities challenged) is expressed only through the suffix "their."
• tzur ("rock", H6697) — a singular noun placed in apposition to "their gods," functioning as an epithet rather than a separate subject.
• cha.Sa.yu ("they sought refuge", H2620) — qal perfect, 3rd person plural, describing a completed past action of taking refuge, modifying tzur via the relative construction "in whom."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is compact: a verb of speech ('a.Mar), followed directly by a question with no explicit subject noun for the speaker and no explicit noun for those being addressed — both are carried by suffixes and by the verb's person marking alone. The question itself has two parts: "Where are the gods of them?" and "[the] rock [in which] they sought refuge in it," where tzur stands in apposition to "gods," restating the same referent under a different image. The suffix bo ("in it/him", H9033) on the preposition be ("in", H9003) closes the clause by referring back to tzur, producing a construction that in Hebrew reads almost like a doubled epithet: "their gods — the rock they sought refuge in."

Grammatically, the verse depends entirely on suffixes and verb-person markers to establish who is speaking and who is being spoken about; no proper noun appears in this verse itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX inserts an explicit subject, "Κύριος" ("Lord"), for the verb "he will say," a subject not present as a separate word in the Hebrew of this verse. The Vulgate, like the Hebrew, leaves the subject unstated ("Et dicet").

Regarding tzur ("rock", H6697), the LXX renders the phrase as "ἐφ' οἷς ἐπεποίθεισαν ἐπ' αὐτοῖς" ("in whom they had trusted"), and the Vulgate similarly reads "in quibus habebant fiduciam" ("in whom they had trust") — both versions drop the separate noun "rock" and merge it into the verb of trusting, whereas the Hebrew keeps tzur as a distinct appositional noun to "their gods."