In Spanish, this is the difference between tu and vosotros. In German, it’s du and ihr. In English, one says ‘you’ to one person, but also ‘you’ to a whole room full of people.
A manager might say ‘you have some really good work here!’ to one employee, or to a whole team of them. So when we translate God’s Word into English from its original Hebrew or Greek, we might lose something along the way: the difference between you and y’all.
Consider the stock phrase, ‘the Lord your God,’ used many times throughout the Bible. There are two versions of this phrase, one singular and one plural.
English translations hide the difference. Roughly, these two would be equivalent to der Herr dein Gott and der Herr euer Gott.
A mapping of the distribution of these two terms can be instructive. While used with approximately the same frequency in the book of Exodus, the plural is used six times before the singular form appears once, and that first occurrence of the singular is in chapter fifteen, almost halfway through the book.
Leviticus uses the plural exclusively, with no occurrences of the singular.
Deuteronomy uses both forms, uses them frequently, and uses them in close alternation.
What does this linguistic feature of the text reveal about God? The deliberate alternation between the singular and the plural suggests that God is emphasizing that followers of Jesus live in a balance between the corporate and the individual.
To speak of the “Lord your God” (der Herr dein Gott) in the singular is to accent the discrete, one-on-one, relation which God has with each human. (This relation is discrete, but not always discreet.) Although there are more than seven billion people on the planet, God knows each individual as an individual.
To speak of the “Lord y’all’s God” (der Herr euer Gott) in the plural is to remind the reader that we also have a corporate relationship with God. Jesus reminds us that there is a dynamic which occurs when “two or three are gathered in My name.”
This distinction between singular and plural also comes into play in imperatives: is a command given to each person individually, or to the group as a unit?
The second person pronoun as a direct object also shows this difference: If God says that He will “bless you” or “love you” or “lead you,” is the ‘you’ singular or plural?
Needless to say, this topic demands further investigation.
