Deuteronomy 19:21

Summary

The verse instructs that there must be no pity, expressed idiomatically as "your eye will not show pity," followed by a series of five paired terms (life, eye, tooth, hand, foot) each joined by the preposition "for," establishing exact equivalence between the items in each pair.

Key words

• ta.Chos ("it will look with pity", H2347) — qal imperfect, third person feminine singular, agreeing with "eye" as the grammatical subject of the clause.
• 'ei.Ne.kha ("your eye", H5869A + H9021) — feminine singular noun in construct form with a second-person masculine singular suffix; the eye is the acting subject, not the object of pity.
• Ne.fesh ("life", H5315H) — feminine singular noun, repeated twice and linked by the preposition be ("for", H9003) to form the first equivalence pair.
• be. ("for", H9003) — preposition repeated five times, one before each second member of the pairs (life, eye, tooth, hand, foot), producing the parallel structure "X for X."
• 'A.yin ("eye", H5869A) — same noun as in 'ei.Ne.kha, here used in the paired list without the possessive suffix, referring to the body part in the abstract pairing formula.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause opens with the negation Lo' ("not", H3808) plus the verb ta.Chos ("it will look with pity", H2347), whose grammatical subject is 'ei.Ne.kha ("your eye", H5869A + H9021). This construction places "eye" — not the person — as the one who acts (or fails to act) with pity: literally "your eye will not have compassion." This idiom uses a body part as the subject of an emotional/perceptual verb, a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew for expressing personal disposition.

After this clause, five noun pairs follow, each formed by repeating the same noun twice, connected by the preposition be. ("for", H9003): Ne.fesh be.Ne.fesh ("life for life"), 'A.yin be.'A.yin ("eye for eye"), shen be.Shen ("tooth for tooth"), yad be.Yad ("hand for hand"), Re.gel be.Ra.gel ("foot for foot"). The repetition of identical nouns with the preposition "for" between them creates a formulaic structure of exact correspondence, listing five body parts in sequence without any connecting verb — the parallelism itself carries the sense of equivalence between what is described in each pair.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening clause as οὐ φείσεται ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ἐπ' αὐτῷ ("the eye will not spare/pity over him"), adding ἐπ' αὐτῷ ("over him"), an object phrase not present in the Hebrew text, which has no explicit object for the pity clause. The Vulgate shifts the grammatical subject from "eye" to the addressed person: Non misereberis ejus ("you will not have mercy on him"), and adds ejus ("of him"), also absent from the Hebrew. The Vulgate further adds the verb exiges ("you shall exact") at the end of the pair list, a verb not present in the Hebrew, which leaves the five pairs without any governing verb.