Deuteronomy 22:18

Summary

The verse describes a legal procedure: the elders of the city in question take hold of a man and administer punishment to him. The action is presented as the next step in a sequence of events, following prior narrative context.

Key words

• lakechu ("they will take", H3947) — qal verb in sequential perfect form, continuing the chain of narrative actions; the subject is plural ("they").
• ziknei ("elders of", H2205) — masculine plural noun in construct state, meaning it must be linked to what follows ("elders of the city").
• ha'ir ("the city", H5892) — feminine singular noun with definite article, specifying a particular city rather than cities in general.
• hiv' ("that", H1931) — personal pronoun functioning as a demonstrative, pointing back to a city already identified in the surrounding text.
• yisseru ("they will punish", H3256) — piel (intensive) verb in sequential perfect form; the piel stem often signals a more forceful or thorough action than the simple qal would convey.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built from two clauses joined by the narrative vav (H9001), each headed by a sequential perfect verb: lakechu ("they will take") and yisseru ("they will punish"). This construction chains the two actions together as consecutive steps: first the taking, then the punishing. The subject of both verbs is ziknei ha'ir hahiv' ("the elders of that city"), a construct phrase where ziknei ("elders of") is grammatically bound to ha'ir ("the city"), and the demonstrative hiv' ("that") specifies which city is meant, referring back to an antecedent established earlier in the passage.

The object of the first verb is marked by the untranslated object marker 'et (H0853) followed by ha'ish ("the man", H0376), a definite singular noun identifying a specific individual rather than a generic "a man." The second clause repeats the object-marking pattern, this time with a pronominal suffix: 'oto ("him", built from H0853 + H9033), referring back to the same man just introduced.

The verb yisseru comes from the piel stem, which in Biblical Hebrew grammar typically intensifies or gives factitive force to an action compared to the simpler qal stem. This distinguishes the punishing action as deliberate and executed, rather than merely stated as a possibility.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders yisseru ("they will punish", H3256) as verberabunt ("they will beat/flog"), a more specific physical term than the Hebrew's general "discipline/punish" sense conveyed by the piel of H3256. The LXX uses παιδεύσουσιν ("they will instruct/discipline"), a term that in Greek can carry connotations of corrective instruction, differing in emphasis from the Vulgate's more concrete "beating." The Hebrew verb itself does not specify the method of punishment, leaving that detail to be supplied differently by each version.