Deuteronomy 20:11

Summary

The verse describes the conditional outcome of a siege: if the besieged city responds with "peace" and opens itself, the people found inside become forced laborers who serve the Israelite party. The sentence is built as a chain of sequential clauses connected by the narrative vav ("and"), moving from condition to consequence.

Key words

• sha.Lom ("peace", H7965G) — the noun functions as the grammatical subject of the following verb, not merely an adverbial description of how the answer is given.
• ta.'an ("it will answer", H6030B) — qal imperfect, third person (marked "she" in the data), agreeing with shalom as its subject: "peace" is what "answers."
• nim.tza' ("is found", H4672) — niphal participle, describing the people passively as "the ones found" inside the city, rather than as agents.
• mas ("forced labor", H4522) — the noun designating the status the people will occupy, introduced by the preposition la. ("into").
• 'a.va.Du ("they will serve", H5647G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the chain of consequences begun by ve.hayah ("and it will be", H1961).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is structured as a conditional ('im, "if") embedded within a chain of vav-sequential perfects that narrate a sequence of future events: "and it will be... if peace answers you... and it opens to you... and it will be [that] all the people found in it will become for you into forced labor and they will serve you." The grammatical subject of "answers" is shalom itself, not the people of the city — the text speaks of "peace" as the one that responds, a construction that personifies the abstract noun rather than naming the city's inhabitants as the subject of the reply. The people who remain inside the city are described with a niphal (passive-reflexive) participle, ha.nnim.tza' ("the one being found"), casting them as those who are found present, not as agents initiating any action. The final clause piles up two verbs for their resulting status — becoming mas ("forced labor") and then "serving" ('avad) — both governed by the same conditional chain.

Differences between versions

The LXX shifts the grammatical subject: instead of "peace" answering, it reads "ἐὰν... ἀποκριθῶσίν σοι" ("if they answer you"), making the city's people, not shalom, the subject of the verb. The Vulgate diverges further, adding "portas" ("gates") where the Hebrew text has no explicit noun for gates (only fa.te.Chah, "it will open"), and rendering the outcome for the people as "salvabitur" ("will be saved") rather than the Hebrew's specific designation "will become forced labor" (yihyu lekha lamas).