Deuteronomy 22:28

Summary

Deuteronomy 22:28 describes a conditional legal scenario: a man finds an unbetrothed young virgin, seizes her, and lies with her, and the two are discovered. The verse sets up the circumstances that the following verse (not included here) will address with a legal consequence.

Key words

• yim.Tza' ("he will find", H4672) — qal imperfect, opening the conditional clause; describes an unplanned encounter rather than a search.
• na.'ar ("a young woman", H5291) paired with ve.tu.Lah ("a virgin", H1330) — two feminine singular nouns in apposition, together specifying the female party as young and unmarried/without prior sexual experience implied by the term.
• 'o.Ra.sah ("she is betrothed", H0781) — pual (passive, intensive) perfect; the passive voice marks her status as something done to her (being pledged), and the perfect + negation lo' ("not", H3808) establishes she is not in that state.
• te.fa.Sa ("he will seize", H8610) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by yim.Tza'; denotes physical grasping.
• nim.Tza.'u ("they will be found", H4672) — niphal (passive) sequential perfect, plural; this closes the verse by returning to the same root as the opening verb yim.Tza', but now passive and plural, shifting from "he finds her" to "they are found [together]."

What the text says

The Hebrew verse is built as a single extended conditional (ki, "if", H3588A) clause, chained together with sequential perfects following the initial imperfect yim.Tza'. This chaining (u-tefasah, ve-shakhav, ve-nimtza'u) presents four actions as one continuous narrative sequence: finding, seizing, lying with, being found. The relative clause 'asher lo' 'orasah ("who is not betrothed") is inserted immediately after the description of the young woman, using a pual (passive) verb to state her marital status as a completed condition rather than an ongoing one.

A notable grammatical feature is the shift from the qal (active) form of matza ("to find", H4672) at the start of the verse to the niphal (passive) form nimtza'u at the end. The same root that describes the man finding the woman is used again — passively and in the plural — to describe both parties being found together, creating a structural echo between the beginning and end of the verse.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders tefasah ("he will seize", H8610) with the participle βιασάμενος ("having forced/violated"), making explicit a notion of force that in the Hebrew is carried by the verb "seize" without a separate term for violence. The Vulgate's closing clause, res ad judicium venerit ("the matter comes to judgment"), differs from the Hebrew nimtza'u ("they are found", H4672), which describes the couple being discovered rather than a matter reaching judicial proceedings.