Deuteronomy 17:7

Summary

The verse specifies the order of execution for someone condemned under the preceding law: the witnesses' hand acts first in putting the person to death, followed by the hand of the whole people. The final clause commands the removal of the evil from the community's midst.

Key words

• yad ("hand", H3027G) — construct noun appearing twice, forming "hand of the witnesses" and "hand of...the people"; the construct state links the hand to its owner and frames execution as an act performed by particular agents.
• tihyeh ("it will be", H1961) — qal imperfect, feminine (agreeing with yad, itself grammatically feminine), indicating that the witnesses' hand will be the first to act, expressing sequence rather than static description.
• bariʾshonah ("at the first", H7223G) — feminine singular ordinal used adverbially with the preposition va ("in the"), marking the initial stage of the action.
• lahamito ("to put him to death", H4191) — hiphil infinitive with pronominal suffix "him"; the hiphil stem marks a causative sense ("to cause death"), and the infinitive expresses purpose ("in order to put him to death").
• viʿarta ("you will remove", H1197I) — piel sequential perfect, second person masculine singular; the piel stem intensifies the action ("to burn out / clear away"), and the sequential perfect continues the narrative chain begun earlier in the legal instruction.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two parallel construct phrases — yad haʿedim ("hand of the witnesses") and yad kol-haʿam ("hand of all the people") — each governed by a temporal adverb: bariʾshonah ("at the first") and baʾacharonah ("at the last"). This creates a chiastic balance: first agent / first position, second agent / second position. The verb tihyeh appears only once, governing the first clause, while the second clause (veyad kol-haʿam baʾacharonah) has no repeated verb, the parallel structure implying the same verb applies to both. The infinitive lahamito explains the purpose of the witnesses' hand acting first — it is directed toward causing death — using the hiphil stem to underline that the witnesses initiate/cause the killing rather than merely observe it.

The final clause shifts from the qal/hiphil legal description to the piel verb viʿarta, marking a change in address: the text moves from describing the witnesses' and people's actions to directly addressing "you" (singular), commanding the removal of haraʿ ("the evil", H7451B) from qirbecha ("your midst", H7130G), a construct noun with a second-person singular suffix.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two temporal adverbs as ἐν πρώτοις ("among the first") and ἐπ' ἐσχάτων ("at the last"), preserving the sequence but using plural forms rather than the Hebrew feminine singular ordinals. The Vulgate renders bariʾshonah and baʾacharonah as adjectives prima and extrema modifying manus ("hand") directly, rather than as separate adverbial temporal phrases, producing "the first hand will kill... the last hand will be sent," a structurally different construction from the Hebrew. Where the Hebrew closing clause addresses a singular "you" (mikkirbecha, "from your midst"), the LXX uses ἐξ ὑμῶν αὐτῶν ("from your own selves," plural), shifting the addressee from singular to plural.