The people’s answer in the first part of the verse offers no difficulty. Moses is reporting what the people said to him at Kadesh Barnea.

We have sinned against the LORD: the verb “to sin” in a context like this means primarily to do something contrary to God’s will, and something like “make a mistake” or “commit an error” is not strong enough; the general idea of “do something bad,” that is, something that violates moral values and standards, will in places be an adequate translation. But when God is expressly mentioned, as here, the sense of disobeying God’s command is required. So Contemporary English Version has “We disobeyed the LORD our God.”

We will go up and fight: the men are ready to set out at once and invade the land. In languages that require an object or goal for fight, we may translate, for example, “fight our [inclusive] enemies.”

And every man of you girded on his weapons of war: the obsolete verb “to gird” means to put on or around, and here it means to put on a shield and perhaps a helmet, in addition to taking up a sword or spear. New Revised Standard Version “strapped on your battle gear” is much clearer; or we may even say “put on all your weapons [for fighting],” or in languages spoken by people who do not strap on weapons, we may say something like “all of you carrying your weapons.”

And thought it easy to go up into the hill country: the Hebrew verb translated thought it easy occurs only here in the Old Testament, and its meaning is not quite certain; most translate as do Revised Standard Version and Good News Translation.

The hill country is the land of Canaan itself, to the north of Kadesh Barnea, where they are. For hill country see verse 7.

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Deuteronomy. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .