Deuteronomy 17:6

Summary

The verse establishes that a person condemned to death must be executed only on the testimony of two or three witnesses. It explicitly forbids capital punishment based on the testimony of a single witness. The structure repeats the phrase "on the mouth of" to frame testimony as the legal basis for the verdict.

Key words

• pi ("mouth of", H6310I) — construct singular noun, appearing twice (lines 2 and 14); literally "mouth," used idiomatically to mean "testimony" or "word," governing the following witness count.
• 'e.Dim ("witnesses", H5707) — masculine plural, used for both "two witnesses" and "three witnesses," marking the required plurality.
• yu.Mat ("he will be put to death", H4191) — hophal (causative passive) imperfect, appearing twice; the passive form indicates the subject undergoes the action of being put to death, rather than performing it.
• ha-Met ("the one who dies", H4191 + H9009) — qal participle with definite article, describing the person under judgment as "the one dying/doomed," distinct grammatically from the hophal yumat.
• 'e.Chad ("one", H0259) — feminine singular numeral modifying 'ed ("witness," H5707), closing the verse by naming the excluded minimum.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as two parallel clauses, each opening with the preposition 'al ("on," H5921A) followed by pi ("mouth of," H6310I) and a witness count. The first clause states the positive condition: 'al-pi she.Na.yim 'e.Dim 'o she.lo.Shah 'e.Dim yu.Mat ha-Met — "on the mouth of two witnesses or three witnesses, the one who dies will be put to death." The repetition of 'e.Dim ("witnesses") after both "two" and "three" gives each number its own witness-count phrase, rather than treating them as a single combined clause.

The verb pair yu.Mat / ha-Met uses two different stems of the same root (H4191): the hophal yu.Mat denotes the passive action of being executed, while the qal participle ha-Met names the condemned person as "the one dying" — a participial designation rather than a finished action. This distinction is grammatical: the participle marks status (the one facing death), while the hophal marks the legal act performed upon him.

The second clause mirrors the first structurally but negates it: lo' yu.Mat 'al-pi 'ed 'e.Chad — "he will not be put to death on the mouth of one witness." The numeral 'e.Chad ("one," H0259) is grammatically feminine while 'ed ("witness") is masculine; this gender mismatch reflects normal Hebrew numeral usage rather than a scribal irregularity in the source data provided.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the participle ha-Met as "qui interficietur" ("who will be killed"), using a future passive verb rather than a participle, and adds "Nemo occidatur" ("no one shall be killed") as an explicit general prohibition not present as a separate clause in the Hebrew or the LXX. The LXX keeps the participial sense with ὁ ἀποθνήσκων ("the one dying"), closer to the Hebrew construction than the Vulgate's finite verb.