Deuteronomy 8:4

Summary

The verse states that the clothing of the addressee did not wear out and his foot did not swell during a period identified as forty years. It forms part of a retrospective statement about the wilderness experience, marked grammatically as completed action.

Key words

• sim.la.te.kha ("your clothing", H8071) — feminine singular noun in construct form with a 2nd person masculine singular suffix, "clothing of you."
• val.tah ("it wore out", H1086) — qal perfect, 3rd feminine singular, agreeing with sim.la.te.kha; the perfect aspect marks the action as completed, hence "did not wear out" as a finished state over the described time.
• rag.le.kha ("your foot", H7272) — feminine singular noun in construct form with the 2nd person masculine singular suffix, parallel in structure to sim.la.te.kha.
• va.tze.kah ("it swelled", H1216) — qal perfect, 3rd feminine singular, agreeing with rag.le.kha, again completed aspect.
• zeh ("this", H2088) — demonstrative particle used here to introduce the span of time, "this forty years."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as two parallel clauses, each with the pattern noun-in-construct + suffix + negation + qal perfect verb (feminine singular). The first clause, sim.la.te.kha lo' val.tah me.'a.lei.kha ("your clothing not it-wore-out from-on-you"), places the subject (sim.la.te.kha) before the negation lo' (H3808) and the verb val.tah (H1086), a common word order in Biblical Hebrew for marked negative statements. The prepositional phrase me.'a.lei.kha ("from upon you", H9006 + H5921A + H9031) reinforces the sense of the clothing not detaching or deteriorating from the body.

The second clause mirrors the first exactly in structure: ve.rag.le.kha lo' va.tze.kah ("and your foot not it-swelled"). Both verbs, val.tah and va.tze.kah, are qal perfect feminine singular forms agreeing with their respective feminine subjects (sim.la.te.kha, rag.le.kha), producing a balanced two-part statement with matching grammar in each half.

The closing phrase zeh 'ar.ba.'im sha.nah ("this forty year[s]") uses the demonstrative zeh (H2088) with the numeral 'ar.ba.'im (H0705, "forty") and the singular noun sha.nah (H8141, "year"), a construction where the numeral governs a singular noun rather than a plural, typical for round number expressions in Biblical Hebrew.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew's two clauses (clothing/foot) as three items: ἱμάτιά ("garments"), ὑποδήματά ("sandals/shoes"), and πόδες ("feet"), adding a reference to footwear not present in the Hebrew text, which mentions only sim.la.te.kha ("your clothing") and rag.le.kha ("your foot"). The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's two-part structure (vestimentum, pes) but adds the clarifying phrase "quo operiebaris" ("with which you were covered"), an expansion not present in the Hebrew or the LXX.