Deuteronomy 33:2

Summary

The verse opens Moses' blessing by describing Yehovah's approach as a series of movements from three locations — Sinai, Seir, and Paran — using verbs of coming, dawning, and shining. It closes with a description of his arrival accompanied by "ten thousands of holy ones" and something at his right hand described in the Hebrew as esh dat ("fire of law/decree").

Key words

• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the subject of all four following verbs of movement.
• ba ("he came", H0935G) — qal perfect, a completed action, first in the sequence: coming from Sinai.
• hofia ("he shone forth", H3313) — hiphil (causative) perfect, intensifying the "shining" idea already given by zarach ("he dawned", H2224); the causative stem marks this as a stronger, deliberate manifestation rather than a passive dawning.
• rivvot ("ten thousands of", H7233) — feminine plural construct, linked to qodesh ("holy one[s]", H6944G), forming the phrase "ten thousands of holy ones."
• esh ("fire of", H0784) — construct form directly followed by dat ("law", H1881), producing the construct phrase "fire of law," attached to mi-ymino ("from his right hand", H3225G) with the 3rd person suffix -o ("his", H9023).

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four perfect-tense verbs — ba ("came"), zarach ("dawned"), hofia ("shone forth", hiphil), and atah ("came", sequential perfect) — each paired with a geographic origin (Sinai, Seir, Har Paran). This creates a rhetorical movement across space, as if Yehovah's approach is traced through successive stations. The repeated lamo ("to/for them", H9038, appearing twice) marks the beneficiaries of this approach, though the person implied (them/us) is not marked with total clarity in the pronoun's form alone.

The final clause combines two construct chains: rivvot qodesh ("ten thousands of holy one[s]") and esh dat ("fire of law"), both governed by the phrase mi-ymino ("from his right hand"). The construct state in Hebrew links nouns tightly without a supplied verb, so the exact relationship between "his right hand" and "fire of law" is left grammatically compressed — the text does not supply a verb such as "there was" or "he held."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew esh dat ("fire of law") is rendered very differently in the LXX, which reads ἄγγελοι μετ' αὐτοῦ ("angels with him") instead of any reference to fire or law at that position. The Vulgate renders it as ignea lex ("fiery law"), preserving both elements as an adjective-noun pair rather than a construct chain. For rivvot qodesh ("ten thousands of holy ones"), the LXX gives only σὺν μυριάσιν ("with myriads") without a separate word for "holy," while the Vulgate's sanctorum millia ("thousands of holy ones") keeps both elements, as does the Hebrew. The particle lamo ("to/for them") is rendered as ἡμῖν ("to us") in the LXX and "nobis" ("to us") in the Vulgate, both shifting the person from the Hebrew's third-person plural form to first-person.