Deuteronomy 11:17

Summary

The verse describes a chain of consequences that will follow disobedience: Yehovah's anger will ignite, the sky will be sealed shut, rain will cease, the ground will withhold its produce, and the people will quickly perish from the land that Yehovah is giving them.

Key words

• chaRah ("it will burn", H2734) — qal sequential perfect; continues a chain of future consequences begun in the preceding verse, here describing the kindling of anger.
• 'af ("[the] anger of", H0639G) — masculine singular noun in construct, forming the phrase "anger of Yehovah"; the construct binds the noun tightly to the following divine name.
• 'atzar ("he will shut up", H6113) — qal sequential perfect, parallel in form to chaRah, continuing the same chain: Yehovah's action of closing the sky follows directly from his anger.
• yehYeh ("it will come", H1961) — qal imperfect, marking an ongoing/future negated state ("there will not be rain"), distinct in aspect from the surrounding sequential perfects.
• noTen ("[is] about to give", H5414G) — qal active participle, masculine singular, describing Yehovah's giving of the land as an ongoing or imminent action rather than a completed one.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of verbs joined by the narrative/sequential vav: chaRah ("it will burn"), 'atzar ("he will shut up"), and 'avadTem ("you will perish") are all sequential perfects, a form used in Biblical Hebrew to continue a series of future or consequential events set up by a prior clause (here, the conditional warning in the preceding verse). Interspersed among these are two imperfect + negation constructions — lo'-yihYeh ("it will not come/be") and lo' titTen ("it will not give") — which describe resulting negated states (no rain, no produce) rather than continuing the main action chain. This grammatical distinction shows a structure of cause (anger, shutting the heavens) leading to effect (absence of rain, absence of produce) leading to consequence (perishing).

The final clause uses the participle noTen ("is about to give/giving") for Yehovah's granting of the land, describing this as a continuous or imminent action, not a completed past event.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the final verb as edoken ("gave"), an aorist (past tense), where the Hebrew participle noTen denotes an ongoing or imminent giving. The Vulgate uses daturus est ("is about to give"), a future periphrastic construction that aligns more closely with the participial sense of the Hebrew. Additionally, the LXX expresses "anger of Yehovah" (Hebrew construct 'af-Yehovah) with two separate words, thymōtheis ("having become angry") and orgē ("with wrath"), rather than a single construct noun phrase.