Deuteronomy 21:13

Summary

The verse describes actions following the previous instructions about a captive woman: she removes the clothing associated with her captivity, dwells in the man's house, and mourns her father and mother for a full month. After this period, the man may go to her, become her husband, and she becomes his wife.

Key words

• sim.Lat shiv.Yah ("clothing of captivity", H8071 + H7628A) — a construct chain: "clothing" governed by "captivity," meaning the garment identified with her status as captive; the suffix -ah ("her") ties it to her specifically.
• va.khe.Tah ("she will weep for", H1058) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain of actions she performs; grammatically parallel to he.Si.rah ("she will remove") and ya.she.Vah ("she will dwell").
• yeRach yaMim ("month of days", H3391 + H3117G) — construct phrase literally "a month of days," a fixed idiom marking a specified duration.
• ta.Vo' ("you will go", H0935G) — qal imperfect (not sequential perfect like the preceding verbs), marking a shift in aspect: an action pending after the elapsed time, rather than a direct continuation.
• ve.'al.Tah ("you will be husband", H1167H) — qal sequential perfect, resuming the chain after ta.Vo', denoting the man's change of legal/marital status toward her.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ve+qatal forms), a common narrative-legal structure in Biblical Hebrew for describing a series of consequential actions: he.Si.rah ("she will remove"), ya.she.Vah ("she will dwell"), va.khe.Tah ("she will weep for"), ha.ye.Tah ("she will become"). This chain is interrupted once, at ta.Vo' ("you will go"), which is a plain imperfect rather than a sequential perfect. This shift in verb form marks a boundary in the sequence: the actions of the woman (removing clothing, dwelling, mourning) form one block tied to the time period yeRach yaMim ("a month of days"), and only after this interval does the man's action begin, introduced by the adverbial phrase 'A.char ken ("after thus," i.e., "after that").

The double use of the object marker 'et (rule: untranslated) before both "her father" and "her mother" ('a.Vi.ha, "father-her"; 'i.Ma-h, "mother-her") marks each as a distinct direct object of the weeping, rather than a single combined object. The final clause, ha.ye.Tah leKha le.'i.Shah ("she will become to-you for-a-wife"), uses two prepositions with le- ("to/for"), a double construction that expresses result or purpose — she comes to belong to him "as a wife," rather than a simple equative "she is his wife."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va.khe.Tah ("she will weep for") with κλαύσεται ("she will weep"), matching the Hebrew verb but, like the Vulgate's flebit, does not preserve the double 'et marking two separate objects — both simply list "father and mother" as a joined object. The Vulgate adds dormiesque cum illa ("and you will sleep with her"), an explanatory phrase not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew, where the sense of consummation is carried by ve.'al.Tah ("you will be husband," from the same root as Ba'al, "husband/master").