Deuteronomy 5:28

Summary

Yehovah reports having heard the words spoken by the people to Moses, and declares that everything they said was good. The verse is structured as a report within a report: first the narrator states that Yehovah heard the people's speech, then Yehovah's own words to Moses are quoted directly, repeating the verb "heard" and evaluating the people's speech as well spoken.

Key words

• qol ("sound of", H6963K) — construct noun, appearing twice (words 5, 20), literally "voice/sound of," used idiomatically before "words" to mean the sound/content of speech rather than words themselves.
• divrei ("words of", H1697G) — masculine plural construct, paired with qol both times, forming the fixed expression "the sound of the words of."
• be-dabberkhem ("when you spoke", H1696G) — piel infinitive with prefixed preposition be ("when") and 2nd person plural suffix; this construction creates a temporal clause meaning "while/when you were speaking," without a separate temporal conjunction word.
• heitivu ("they have done well", H3190) — hiphil (causative) perfect, 3rd person plural; the causative stem here functions to express doing something well/rightly, evaluating the completed act of speaking.
• dibberu ("they have spoken", H1696G) — piel perfect, appearing twice at the end (words 27 and 33), both referring back to the same act of speaking, creating a repetitive emphasis within the sentence.

What the text says

The verse divides into two reported speech-acts joined by narrative vav (H9001) forms: va-yishma' ("and he heard," word 2) and va-yomer ("and he said," word 14), both qal narrative verbs marking sequential past action. The first clause states that Yehovah heard "the sound of your words" (qol divreikhem) during the time-clause formed by the infinitive be-dabberkhem ("when you spoke") plus the preposition elai ("to me") — this infinitive construction packs a full temporal clause into a single word with a pronominal suffix, a compactness the English "when you spoke to me" cannot replicate without extra words.

The second half is Yehovah's direct speech, introduced by va-yomer... elai ("and he said to me"). Within this speech, the verb "heard" recurs, now as the qal perfect shama'ti ("I have heard," word 18), describing the same hearing event from Yehovah's own voice. The object is again qol divrei ha'am hazeh ("the sound of the words of this people"), followed by the relative clause asher dibberu eleikha ("which they spoke to you," piel perfect). The evaluation follows: heitivu kol asher dibberu — literally "they have done well, all that they have spoken" — where kol ("all," H3605) functions almost as a second subject/object summarizing the totality of what was said, and the final dibberu repeats the same piel perfect verb used just before, creating an inclusio-like repetition of "spoken... spoken" around the evaluative statement.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders be-dabberkhem ("when you spoke") with a participle, λαλούντων πρὸς μέ ("speaking to me"), rather than a finite temporal clause. For heitivu ("they have done well," H3190), the LXX uses the adverb ὀρθῶς ("rightly"), while the Vulgate uses "bene... sunt locuti" ("they have spoken well"), both differing slightly in how they distribute the sense of "well" across the sentence compared to the Hebrew hiphil verb form.