Deuteronomy 5:26

Summary

Deuteronomy 5:26 records Moses recounting the words of the people at Horeb, expressed as a rhetorical question: no human being has heard the voice of the living God speak from the fire and survived, except Israel on that occasion. The verse uses an interrogative construction implying an expected negative answer, followed by a report of what actually happened.

Key words

• mi ("who?", H4310) — interrogative pronoun opening the rhetorical question; combined with ki ("for/that", H3588A), it frames the clause as an incredulous or emphatic question rather than a simple statement.
• basar ("flesh", H1320) — construct-state noun following khol ("all", H3605), forming the phrase "all flesh," a construct chain meaning "any human being."
• 'Elohim chayyim ("God"/"living", H0430G + H2416A) — 'Elohim is grammatically plural (masculine plural noun) but paired with the plural adjective chayyim; both agree in plural form though the referent is singular.
• medaber ("speaking", H1696G) — piel participle, masculine singular, describing an ongoing action ("the one speaking"), modifying qol ("voice") rather than 'Elohim directly in word order.
• vayyechi ("and he lived", H2421) — qal narrative (wayyiqtol) form; morphologically this is the standard past-narrative verb form in Hebrew, here placed at the end of a question, so it reads as "...and lived?" rather than reporting a separate completed event.

What the text says

The clause opens with ki ("for") followed immediately by the interrogative mi ("who"), a combination that produces a rhetorical question rather than a request for information. The subject is built through a construct chain: khol-basar ("all of flesh") — literally "all flesh" — followed by the relative particle 'asher ("who/that"), which introduces the relative clause describing what this "flesh" has or has not done: shama' qol 'Elohim chayyim medaber mitokh ha'esh ("heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire"). Here qol ("voice") is itself in construct with 'Elohim chayyim ("living God"), and medaber is a participle agreeing with qol or with 'Elohim, indicating an act in progress ("speaking") rather than a completed one.

The phrase mitokh ha'esh ("from the midst of the fire") uses tokh ("middle", H8432) in construct with the definite noun ha'esh ("the fire"), locating the speech spatially. Kamonu ("like us") adds the comparative element—this flesh heard "as we have." The verse closes with vayyechi ("and lived"), a wayyiqtol form that in ordinary narrative Hebrew reports a next sequential past action, but here, attached to the rhetorical question begun by mi, it functions as the final element of that question: "...and lived?" The grammatical form itself does not mark it as interrogative — the interrogative force comes from the initial mi, with vayyechi carrying the narrative "and then" sense that closes the questioned sequence.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew vayyechi is a past-narrative form ("and lived"), which the LXX renders as a future middle, καὶ ζήσεται ("and will live"), shifting the verb's temporal orientation forward. The Vulgate uses a subjunctive construction, et possit vivere ("and could live"), expressing possibility rather than a completed or future event. The Spanish RV1909 ("y viva") and SBLIBRE ("y haya vivido") likewise differ from each other in aspect, one using a present subjunctive and the other a perfect subjunctive, reflecting the same underlying divergence in how translators have handled the final verb's mood and tense.