Deuteronomy 33:15

Summary

The verse lists natural blessings tied to the land, poetically describing "the top of the ancient mountains" and "the finest gift of the everlasting hills." It continues a series of construct phrases praising the fertility or majesty of the terrain, likely part of Moses' blessing over a tribe's territory.

Key words

• Rosh ("top of", H7218I) — masculine singular construct noun, marking the summit or highest point, syntactically bound to the following noun.
• harerei ("mountains of", H2042) — masculine plural construct, itself governed by qedem, forming a chain: "the top of the mountains of ancient time."
• Qedem ("ancient time", H6924H) — masculine singular noun; can denote "east" or "antiquity," here anchoring the mountains temporally as ancient.
• Meged ("excellent gift of", H4022) — masculine singular construct, denoting something choice or precious, paired structurally with Rosh in the parallel clause.
• olam ("antiquity", H5769G) — masculine singular noun, parallels qedem, giving the hills the same sense of everlasting duration.

What the text says

The verse is built on two parallel construct chains, each introduced by the conjunction u ("and", H9002) plus the preposition me ("from", H9006): "and from the top of the mountains of ancient time" (lines 1–5) and "and from the excellent gift of the hills of antiquity" (lines 6–10). Each chain stacks three nouns in construct relationship, a common feature of Hebrew poetic parallelism, where the first noun (Rosh / Meged) specifies what quality is drawn from the second noun (harerei / giv'ot), which is itself qualified by a time-word (qedem / olam). The parallelism creates a balance: "top" corresponds to "gift," and "mountains of ancient time" corresponds to "hills of antiquity," reinforcing the idea of enduring, aged natural formations as sources of value.

The double appearance of temporal nouns — qedem ("ancient time") and olam ("antiquity") — is a stylistic pairing typical of Hebrew verse, using near-synonyms to intensify the sense of great age without introducing new information.

Differences between versions

The Septuagint renders both lines with the same noun, κορυφῆς ("peak"), for both Rosh and Meged, flattening the Hebrew's distinction between "top" and "excellent gift." The Vulgate preserves the distinction, using vertice ("summit") for Rosh and pomis ("fruits") for Meged, closer to the Hebrew's contrast between a geographic feature and a produce-related term. The Hebrew qedem ("ancient time") is rendered by the LXX as ἀρχῆς ("beginning"), a related but distinct temporal nuance from "ancient."