Deuteronomy 22:25

Summary

This verse describes the case of a man who finds a betrothed young woman in the open country, seizes her, and lies with her. The text specifies that in this scenario only the man dies, not the woman, distinguishing it from the preceding case set in the city.

Key words

• sadeh ("open country", H7704G) — the location marker that distinguishes this case from the previous verses' urban setting.
• me'orasah ("betrothed", H0781) — pual (passive intensive) participle, feminine singular, describing the young woman as one who has been formally betrothed by another's action.
• hechezik ("he will take hold", H2388H) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; expresses forceful seizing, continuing the narrative chain begun by the initial imperfect yimtza.
• shakhav ("he will lie", H7901I) — qal sequential perfect, the third verb in the narrative chain describing the act.
• levaddo ("to him alone", H0905H) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, isolating the man as the sole party who bears the consequence stated afterward.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle 'im ("if", H0518A) governing an imperfect verb, yimtza ("he will find", H4672), which sets up the hypothetical scenario. What follows is a chain of sequential perfects — hechezik, shakhav, met — a common Biblical Hebrew construction where an initial imperfect is followed by perfects with vav that continue the same time-frame, effectively narrating one connected sequence of events: finding, seizing, lying with, and (as a resulting statement) dying.

The subject of hechezik is explicitly repeated as ha-'ish ("the man", H0376G) even though the verb already carries the "he" subject, which in Hebrew narrative style emphasizes or re-identifies the agent after the object clause. The final clause repeats 'ish once more with the relative particle 'asher ("who", H0834A) to specify precisely which man is meant — "the man who lay with her" — before attaching levaddo ("to him alone"), which grammatically isolates him as the sole bearer of the stated consequence, in contrast to a scenario involving two parties.

Differences between versions

The LXX adds the participle βιασάμενος ("having forced/overpowered"), an explicit term for coercion not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew, where the force is conveyed through hechezik ("took hold") alone. The LXX also shifts grammatical voice in the final clause: it uses ἀποκτενεῖτε ("you [plural] shall kill"), a second-person plural imperative addressed to a community, whereas the Hebrew met ("he will die", H4191) and the Vulgate's morietur ("he will die") both use third-person forms stating the man's death as a resulting fact rather than commanding an action to be performed by others.