Deuteronomy 18:10

Summary

Deuteronomy 18:10 opens a list of forbidden practices by stating that no one is to be found among the people who makes his son or daughter "pass through the fire," followed by a series of terms for diviners and practitioners of occult arts. The verse names four such figures using participial forms: one who divines divinations, a soothsayer, an augurer, and a sorcerer.

Key words

• yimmatze' ("he will be found", H4672) — niphal imperfect, passive/reflexive; the passive sense produces the idiomatic "let there not be found" rather than an active search.
• ma'avir ("[one who] makes pass", H5674A) — hiphil participle, causative; denotes the one who causes his child to pass through the fire, not the child's own action.
• qosem qesamim ("[one who] divines" + "divinations", H7080 + H7081) — qal participle governing a cognate plural noun, a verb-object pairing of the same root ("divining divinations") that intensifies the description of the act.
• me'onen ("a soothsayer", H6049B) — piel participle, intensive stem, naming a specific practitioner type distinct from the qal-form diviner.
• mekhashef ("a sorcerer", H3784) — piel participle, closing the list with another intensive-stem participial title.

What the text says

The verse is built almost entirely from participles functioning as substantives — "the one doing X" — each naming a category of practitioner rather than describing a single event. The sentence opens with lo' yimmatze' vekha ("not he-will-be-found among-you", H3808 + H4672 + H9003/H9031), a niphal construction that frames the whole verse as a prohibition on the existence or presence of such a person, not merely on a forbidden action being performed once. The first specific figure is the ma'avir ("[one who] makes pass", H5674A), governing the compound object beno u-vitto ("his son and his daughter", H1121A + H9023 + H9002 + H1323G + H9023) followed by ba'esh ("in the fire", H9003 + H0784) — the causative hiphil stem marks that this person makes the child pass through, distinguishing agent from action's recipient.

The remainder of the verse lists four practitioner-types using participles from three different verbal stems: the qal qosem paired with its own cognate noun qesamim, then three piel participles — me'onen, menachesh, mekhashef — joined by the conjunction ve- ("and", H9002) before the last two. The piel stem in Hebrew often marks intensive or specialized activity, so these three terms function as fixed titles for specific ritual specialists, syntactically parallel to one another and to the qal-form diviner, all standing as objects of the same governing prohibition established by yimmatze'.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causative ma'avir with perikathairon ("purifying around"), a term emphasizing purification rather than the Hebrew's neutral "causing to pass." The Vulgate uses lustret ("purify/perform lustration"), similarly framing the act in terms of ritual cleansing rather than the Hebrew's simple causative verb of passage. The Vulgate also adds observet somnia ("observe dreams"), an element not present among the Hebrew terms listed in this verse.