Isaiah 32:20

32:20 you will be blessed,

you who plant seed by all the banks of the streams, ¹ 

you who let your ox and donkey graze. ² 

Deuteronomy 11:10

11:10 For the land where you are headed ³  is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, a land where you planted seed and which you irrigated by hand ⁴  like a vegetable garden.

¹ tn Heb “by all the waters.”

² tn Heb “who set free the foot of the ox and donkey”; NIV “letting your cattle and donkeys range free.”

³ tn Heb “you are going there to possess it”; NASB “into which you are about to cross to possess it”; NRSV “that you are crossing over to occupy.”

⁴ tn Heb “with your foot” (so NASB, NLT). There is a two-fold significance to this phrase. First, Egypt had no rain so water supply depended on human efforts at irrigation. Second, the Nile was the source of irrigation waters but those waters sometimes had to be pumped into fields and gardens by foot-power, perhaps the kind of machinery (Arabic shaduf) still used by Egyptian farmers (see C. Aldred, The Egyptians, 181). Nevertheless, the translation uses “by hand,” since that expression is the more common English idiom for an activity performed by manual labor.