Deuteronomy 9:21

Summary

Moses recounts his destruction of the golden calf: he took the "sin" that the people had made, burned it, crushed it, ground it into fine dust, and threw the dust into the wadi flowing down from the mountain. The verse uses a chain of narrative verbs to describe each successive stage of the calf's destruction.

Key words

• chatat ("sin", H2403B) — feminine singular noun in construct form ("sin of"), here referring metonymically to the calf itself as "your sin," rather than to the abstract act.
• 'egel ("calf", H5695) — masculine singular noun, appears with the object marker 'et and definite article, in apposition to chatat, identifying what the "sin" physically was.
• 'esrof ("I burned", H8313) — qal narrative verb, first person, continuing the sequence "and then I burned."
• 'ekot ("I crushed", H3807) — qal narrative verb, first person, moving the action forward: "and then I crushed."
• tachon ("grinding", H2912) and heitev ("well", H3190) — infinitive absolutes (qal and hiphil respectively) stacked together to intensify the crushing action, literally something like "crushing thoroughly."
• dak ("it was fine", H1854) — qal perfect, third person, describing the resulting state: the material "was fine" like dust.

What the text says

The sentence opens with ve'et-chatat'khem ("and your sin", H9002+H0853+H2403B+H9026), placing the object — "your sin" — at the front of the clause before the verb lakachti ("I took", H3947G) appears at the end of the first segment. This word order highlights the object rather than the verb. The phrase chatat'khem is immediately clarified by the appositional phrase 'et-ha'egel ("the calf", H0853+H5695), so "your sin" and "the calf" refer to the same physical object — the noun chatat here functions as a designation for the calf itself, not merely for the act of sinning.

After lakachti, the text shifts into a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs: va'esrof ("and I burned", H8313), va'ekot ("and I crushed", H3807), and later va'ashlikh ("and I threw", H7993). This chain structure marks a sequential list of actions performed one after another. The crushing action is intensified by the double infinitive absolute construction tachon heitev ("grinding well", H2912+H3190), a grammatical device that emphasizes thoroughness of the action described by the finite verb before it. The result of this grinding is stated with the perfect verb dak ("it was fine", H1854), followed by le'afar ("into dust", H9005+H6083), describing the final state of the material. The dust is then said to have been thrown 'el-hanachal hayored min-hahar ("into the wadi that goes down from the mountain", H0413+H9009+H5158A+H9009+H3381+H4480A+H9009+H2022G), where hayored ("was coming down", H3381) is a participle describing the wadi's ongoing characteristic of flowing down from the mountain.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders chatat'khem ("your sin") with tēn hamartian humōn ("the sin of you"), matching the Hebrew noun sense, and explicitly appends ton moschon ("the calf") as a clarifying apposition, similar to the Hebrew structure. The Vulgate renders the same phrase as peccatum vestrum... id est vitulum ("your sin, that is, the calf"), inserting the explanatory phrase "id est" to make explicit the identification that the Hebrew leaves as simple apposition. The double infinitive absolute tachon heitev is rendered in the LXX as a single participle katalesas sphodra ("grinding exceedingly") and in the Vulgate as omninoque... redigens ("reducing entirely"), both flattening the doubled Hebrew emphasis into a single intensifying expression.