Five-minute study · Day 123 · Deuteronomy 29
Deuteronomy 29:29
A word worth stopping on: hidden סָתַר satar
'The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.' Open any ancient Hebrew Torah scroll to this verse and you will find something unusual. Dots appear above certain letters, tiny marks placed by scribes who believed something about this text required special attention. These puncta extraordinaria are among the rarest scribal features in the entire Hebrew Bible. Only fifteen sets exist across all of Torah.
Word study: hidden
- Hebrew
- סָתַר
- Pronounced
- satar
- Strong's
- H5641
- Definition
- To hide, to conceal, to keep secret. Used of deliberate concealment, divine hiddenness, and mysteries withheld from human knowledge.
Satar describes active concealment. When Adam and Eve hide from God in the garden (Genesis 3:8), the verb is a form of satar. When Moses hides his face at the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), satar again. The word implies intentionality. Something is hidden because someone has hidden it.
In Deuteronomy 29:29, the hidden things (ha-nistarot) are those matters God has deliberately placed beyond human reach. The grammar is significant. The participle nistarot (hidden things) is passive: these are things that have been hidden. An agent has concealed them. The verse names that agent: they belong 'to the LORD our God.' This is divine prerogative, a deliberate boundary drawn around human knowledge.
The revealed things (ha-niglot) stand in parallel. These belong 'to us and to our children.' The shift in ownership is the theological pivot. God keeps certain knowledge. He releases other knowledge, specifically the words of the Torah, and assigns them to human custody. You are responsible for what has been revealed. You are not responsible for what remains concealed.
This distinction runs through the wisdom tradition. Job 28 asks, 'Where shall wisdom be found?' and answers that God alone understands its way. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God has set eternity in the human heart 'so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' Isaiah 55:8-9 declares God's thoughts higher than human thoughts. Each passage draws the same line satar draws in Deuteronomy 29:29: there is a boundary, God set it, and wisdom begins with accepting its existence.
Historical context · Ancient scribal tradition, pre-Masoretic
The Mysterious Dots Above the Text
The puncta extraordinaria (extraordinary dots) are one of the most enigmatic features of the Hebrew Torah. In Deuteronomy 29:29, dots appear above the words 'lanu u-levaneynu' ('to us and to our children') and above the first letter of the word 'ad' ('forever'). These are not vowel points, which were added centuries later by the Masoretes. They are older, predating the standardized Masoretic Text by at least several centuries, and their exact meaning has been debated by Jewish scholars for two millennia.
Emanuel Tov's 'Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible' catalogs all fifteen instances of these dots across the Torah. They appear in Genesis 16:5, 18:9, 19:33, 33:4, 37:12; Numbers 3:39, 9:10, 21:30, 29:15; and Deuteronomy 29:28, among others. In the rabbinic tradition (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 34), the dots indicate that Ezra the Scribe was uncertain about these words. If Elijah the prophet were to come and say the words should be deleted, Ezra could point to the dots as evidence he had already marked them. If Elijah said the words should remain, the dots could be removed.
A different tradition holds that the dots signal emphasis: these words carry extra weight and should be read with special attention. In Deuteronomy 29:29, the dotted words 'to us and to our children' create a visual marker that draws the reader's eye to the human side of the equation. The hidden things belong to God. The revealed things, and here the dots pull your attention downward, belong to you.
The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve some of these same markings, confirming that the tradition predates the common era. Scroll 4QDeuteronomy-c from Qumran, dating to the second century BC, shows textual traditions in active conversation with each other. Scribes were not passive copyists. They were engaged readers who left traces of their interpretive care in the physical text itself.
For reflection
Moses drew a line between what God has concealed and what God has revealed, then said your responsibility is the revealed portion. Where are you spending mental energy trying to understand something God has placed in the 'hidden' category, when the 'revealed' things sitting in front of you still need your attention and obedience?
The scribes placed dots above these words thousands of years ago because they believed the text demanded special attention. The verse itself tells you where to focus: the revealed things, given to you and your children, for the purpose of obedience.
Sources: BDB Lexicon; Tov, 'Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible' (3rd ed.); Avot de-Rabbi Natan 34