Deuteronomy 21:12

Summary

Deuteronomy 21:12 describes actions to be taken with a captive woman: she is brought into the man's house, and she herself shaves her head and attends to her nails. The verse is built as a chain of sequential verbs describing successive stages of a procedure.

Key words

• ha.ve.Ta ("you will bring", H0935P) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, 2nd person masculine: the subject "you" causes her to enter.
• Tokh ("[the] middle of", H8432) — construct noun, linking to "your house" to specify the destination as the interior of the dwelling.
• gi.le.Chah ("she will shave", H1548) — piel (intensive) sequential perfect, 3rd person feminine: the grammatical subject performing the shaving is "she", not "you".
• ro.Sha ("head", H7218A) — construct noun with pronominal suffix "her", forming "her head" as the object of the shaving.
• 'a.se.Tah ("she will attend to", H6213A) — qal sequential perfect, 3rd person feminine, governing "her nails" as object.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is a chain of four verbs joined by the narrative/sequential vav, each in the sequential perfect form, which in this construction functions to advance a sequence of actions rather than marking simple past tense. The first verb, ha.ve.Ta ("you will bring", H0935P), is 2nd person masculine, showing that the addressed man is the one who brings the woman 'el- Tokh beiTekha ("into the middle of your house", H0413/H8432/H1004B) — a double-construct phrase emphasizing entry into the interior of the house rather than a peripheral space.

The subject then shifts: gi.le.Chah ("she will shave", H1548) and 'a.se.Tah ("she will attend to", H6213A) are both 3rd person feminine forms. Grammatically, the woman herself performs the shaving of ro.Sha ("her head", H7218A) and the attending to tzi.pa.re.Nei.ha ("her nails", H6856), both marked with the direct object marker 'et- (H0853, untranslated) and both nouns in construct form with a feminine possessive suffix "her". The shift in grammatical subject from "you" (the man, verb 1) to "she" (the woman, verbs 2 and 3) is visible only in the Hebrew verb morphology, not necessarily reproduced in translations that render all actions as instructions to the man.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verbs gi.le.Chah (H1548) and 'a.se.Tah (H6213A) are 3rd person feminine ("she will shave... she will attend to"), and the Vulgate matches this with radet and circumcidet (3rd person, "she shall shave... shall trim"). The LXX, however, renders these same actions with 2nd person singular future forms, ξυρήσεις ("you will shave") and περιονυχιεῖς ("you will pare the nails"), shifting the grammatical subject of these two actions to the man addressed throughout, rather than to the woman.