Deuteronomy 22:13

Summary

Deuteronomy 22:13 opens a casuistic legal formula describing a hypothetical scenario: a man marries a woman, has intercourse with her, and subsequently comes to hate her. This verse sets up the conditions for the law that follows (regarding accusations against a bride's virginity).

Key words

• ki ("if", H3588A) — conditional particle introducing the legal case; marks this as a hypothetical scenario, standard in casuistic law formulas.
• yiqqach ("he will take", H3947G) — qal imperfect; establishes the initial action of the case in a general/future sense ("if a man takes/marries").
• va ("he will go/come", H0935G) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive form); continues the case sequence after the imperfect, here functioning as a euphemism for sexual consummation ("goes into her").
• sene'ah ("he will hate", H8130) — qal sequential perfect; the third link in the chain, marking the shift from marital consummation to the emotional/legal state that triggers the following law.
• 'eleiha ("into her/to her", H0413 + suffix H9034) — preposition with pronominal suffix, indicating the object toward which the action of va is directed.

What the text says

The Hebrew grammar here follows a recognizable casuistic pattern: ki + imperfect verb (yiqqach) opens the conditional clause, establishing the general case ("if a man takes a wife"). What follows is not narrative vav-imperfect but vav + perfect (u-va, u-sene'ah), a sequential construction that continues the logical chain of the case rather than telling a story about a specific past event. This grammatical choice is typical of legal casuistic style in the Torah, where a series of consecutive perfects lays out the stages of a hypothetical situation that the law will then address.

The verb va ("come/go") combined with the preposition 'el ("to/into") plus the suffix "her" forms an idiomatic euphemism for sexual intercourse. The Hebrew does not use an explicit verb for intercourse but relies on this spatial verb-plus-preposition construction, common elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for the same meaning.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders va 'eleiha ("he goes into her") with συνοικήσῃ αὐτῇ ("he cohabits/dwells with her"), a verb emphasizing shared domestic life rather than the spatial/euphemistic construction of the Hebrew. The Vulgate compresses the middle clause, moving directly from "duxerit... uxorem" ("he has taken a wife") to "et postea odio habuerit eam" ("and afterward has held her in hatred"), inserting the temporal marker "postea" ("afterward") to convey the sequence that the Hebrew vav-perfect chain expresses through verb form alone, without a separate lexical rendering of va 'eleiha.