Deuteronomy 1:39
Context1:39 Also, your infants, who you thought would die on the way, 1 and your children, who as yet do not know good from bad, 2 will go there; I will give them the land and they will possess it.
Deuteronomy 28:55
Context28:55 He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict 3 you in your villages.
1 tn Heb “would be a prey.”
2 sn Do not know good from bad. This is a figure of speech called a merism (suggesting a whole by referring to its extreme opposites). Other examples are the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9), the boy who knows enough “to reject the wrong and choose the right” (Isa 7:16; 8:4), and those who “cannot tell their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11). A young child is characterized by lack of knowledge.
3 tn Heb “besiege,” redundant with the noun “siege.”