Deuteronomy 22:21

Summary

The verse describes the legal procedure following a finding described in the preceding verses: the young woman (na'arah, H5291) is to be brought to the entrance of her father's house, where the men of her city stone her to death. The text states the reason for this outcome — she has done nevalah ("folly", H5039) in Israel by acting as a prostitute (liznot, H2181) in her father's house — and closes with a command to remove the evil from the community's midst.

Key words

• na'arah ("young woman", H5291) — feminine singular noun with definite article, the subject of the action being carried out upon her.
• nevalah ("folly", H5039) — feminine singular noun; names the offense in abstract terms rather than describing it directly.
• liznot ("acting as a prostitute", H2181) — qal infinitive, functioning here to specify what the nevalah consisted of.
• bi'arta ("you will remove", H1197I) — piel (intensive) sequential perfect, second person masculine singular; the verb's basic sense in other contexts can relate to burning, but here it carries the sense of removal/purging.
• qirbecha ("your midst", H7130G + H9021) — construct noun with 2ms pronominal suffix, closing the verse by locating the "evil" within the addressee's community.

What the text says

The verse continues a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ve-hotzi'u, "and they will bring out"; u-sekalu, "and they will stone"; va-metah, "and she will die"; u-vi'arta, "and you will remove") that structure the passage as a series of consequences following one another. This verbal chain shifts grammatical subject: "they" (the men) bring her out and stone her, "she" dies, and then the address shifts to "you" (masculine singular) for the final command to remove the evil. This shift in person moves the text from a narrated collective action to a direct command addressed to an individual (or Israel addressed collectively in the singular).

The reason clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A) uses the perfect verb asetah ("she has done", H6213A) followed by the noun nevalah and the infinitive liznot, which together specify the nature of the nevalah: the abstract noun is defined by the infinitive that follows it, rather than the text using a single direct term for the act itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders be-Yisrael ("in Israel", H3478) as ἐν υἱοῖς Ἰσραήλ, "in the sons of Israel," adding "sons of" where the Hebrew has simply "Israel." The Vulgate renders the bringing-out (hotzi'u, H3318H + el-petach, "to the entrance") as extra fores, "outside the doors," while the LXX's ἐπὶ τὰς θύρας, "to the doors," stays closer to the Hebrew's "to the entrance of."