Deuteronomy 4:3

Summary

The verse recalls that the Israelites themselves witnessed what Yehovah did at Baal Peor, and states that every person who had followed Baal Peor was destroyed by Yehovah from among the people. The sentence links direct testimony ("your eyes saw") with a report of divine judgment against apostasy at that place.

Key words

• 'einei ("own eyes", H5869A) — feminine dual construct, forming the phrase "eyes of you (pl.)," the grammatical subject of the clause.
• ro'ot ("the ones which saw", H7200G) — qal participle feminine plural with the article, functioning as a predicate that turns "eyes" into "the seeing ones," giving a stative, ongoing sense of witnessing rather than a simple past verb.
• halakh ("he walked", H1980N) — qal perfect, describing a completed action of following, used inside the relative clause defining "every man."
• hishmid ("he destroyed", H8045) — hiphil (causative) perfect: Yehovah is grammatically the one who causes destruction, not merely an agent of ordinary killing.
• qirbekha ("your midst", H7130G) — construct noun with 2nd person suffix, marking the location "from among you" from which the destruction removed the guilty parties.

What the text says

The first clause is built as a nominal sentence: 'einekhem ha-ro'ot ("your eyes [are] the ones-that-saw"), using the definite article plus a participle instead of a finite verb. This construction presents the seeing not as a single past event but as an established, recognized fact — "your eyes are the witnesses." The object of that seeing is introduced by the untranslated marker 'et (H0853) plus the relative 'asher ("that which," H0834A), governing the clause "Yehovah did at Baal Peor."

The second half of the verse begins with ki (H3588A), here functioning as a causal/explanatory particle ("for/because"), introducing the reason behind the preceding statement. Its subject, kol ha-'ish 'asher halakh 'acharei Ba'al Pe'or ("every man who walked after Baal Peor"), is placed at the front of the clause before the main verb — a left-dislocated topic. The verb hishmido ("he destroyed him") then carries a pronominal suffix -o ("him") that grammatically resumes this fronted phrase, so the structure reads literally: "every man who followed Baal Peor — Yehovah your God destroyed him from your midst." This resumptive-pronoun pattern allows Hebrew to foreground the class of people affected before stating what happened to them.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the object of "saw" as panta hosa epoiēsen ("all that he did"), adding "all," where the Hebrew simply has 'asher 'asah ("that which he did") without a quantifier. The LXX also inserts ho theos hēmōn ("our God") after "Kyrios" in the first clause, an epithet absent from the Hebrew at that point (Hebrew has only Yehovah there). The Vulgate renders the second clause interpretively as "contriverit omnes cultores ejus" ("he crushed all his worshippers"), explicitly naming "worshippers," while the Hebrew text has the broader phrase kol ha-'ish ("every man"), without specifying cultic devotion.