Deuteronomy 15:4

Summary

The verse states that there will be no needy person among the people, provided that Yehovah blesses them in the land he is giving them as an inheritance. The clause functions as a qualification or condition following the preceding statement in Deuteronomy 15, tying the absence of poverty to divine blessing in the land.

Key words

• 'Efes ("nevertheless", H0657A) — a noun in construct form used adverbially to introduce a qualifying or contrastive clause, roughly "however" or "except that."
• ki ("for/that", H3588A) — appears twice (items 2 and 8), a subordinating particle introducing conditional or causal clauses ("if/that... for").
• va.Rekh + ye.va.rekh.Kha ("surely bless" + "he will bless you", H1288) — an infinitive followed by an imperfect of the same root (piel stem), a construction that intensifies the verbal action, here rendered "surely bless."
• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name, subject of the blessing action.
• no.ten ("[is] about to give", H5414G) — a qal participle describing an ongoing or imminent action, "the one giving," describing Yehovah's continuous role in granting the land.

What the text says

The verse opens with 'Efes (H0657A), a construct-form noun used here not as a possessive but as a discourse marker meaning "nevertheless" or "however," signaling a qualification to what precedes. This is followed by ki (H3588A) introducing a negated clause: lo' yihyeh-bekha 'evyon — "there will not be among you a needy person" — using the qal imperfect yihyeh (H1961) for future/ongoing state and the adjective 'evyon (H0034) for "needy."

The second ki (item 8) introduces the reason or condition for this state: the doubled construction barekh yevarekhekha (H1288), infinitive plus imperfect of the same root, which in Biblical Hebrew grammar intensifies or emphasizes the verbal action — "he will surely bless you." The subject is Yehovah (H3068G). The blessing is located ba'aretz ("in the land", H0776G), which is further specified by a relative clause: 'asher Yehovah 'eloheikha noten lekha nachalah lerishtah — "which Yehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess it." Here noten (H5414G) is a qal participle, indicating a continuous or imminent giving, and nachalah (H5159) designates the land specifically as an "inheritance," with the infinitive rishtah (H3423G) expressing the purpose "to possess it," suffixed with -ah (H9034) referring back to the land.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the emphatic infinitive+imperfect construction as a single subjunctive verb, benedicat ("may he bless"), without reproducing the doubling present in the Hebrew barekh yevarekhekha and in the LXX's participle-plus-future construction εὐλογῶν εὐλογήσει. The Vulgate also adds mendicus ("beggar") alongside indigens ("needy one"), where the Hebrew has only the single term 'evyon (H0034). The RV1909 renders the emphatic construction as "te bendecirá con abundancia" ("will bless you abundantly"), introducing the notion of "abundance," which is not a distinct lexical item in the Hebrew but an interpretive expansion of the doubled verb form.