Deuteronomy 22:29

Summary

The verse states that a man who has lain with an unmarried young woman must pay her father fifty (units of) silver, that she becomes his wife, and that he is permanently barred from sending her away, for as long as he lives.

Key words

• na.tan ("he will give", H5414N) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain begun in the preceding verses, marking this as the next required action.
• sho.Khev ("lay", H7901I) — qal participle; identifies "the man" not by a fixed past act alone but as "the one who lies/lay," functioning as a substantive descriptor attached to ha'Ish ("the man", H0376G).
• 'i.Nah ("he has humiliated", H6031B) — piel perfect; the intensive stem marks the action as forceful/injurious, distinct from the simple qal form of "lying with."
• tih.Yeh ("she will become", H1961) — qal imperfect; expresses the resulting state as ongoing/future, the outcome that follows the payment.
• yu.Khal ("he will be able", H3201) with lo' ("not", H3808) — imperfect negated, forming a durative prohibition rather than a single-instance command; reinforced by shale.Cha ("to send away", H7971I), a piel infinitive.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a sequence: ve.na.tan ("and he will give") opens the clause with a vav-sequential perfect, showing this stipulation follows logically from what precedes it in the passage. The subject is ha'Ish ha.sho.Khev 'i.Mah — "the man, the one lying with her" — where the participle sho.Khev functions almost like a title identifying the responsible party by his action rather than naming him independently. The payment clause names the recipient, la.'aVi ha.na'a.Rah ("to the father of the young woman", H0001G + H5291), and the amount, cha.mi.Shim Ka.sef ("fifty silver", H2572 + H3701G), with no unit noun for "shekel" present in this Hebrew string — the quantity term stands with the metal-noun Ka.sef alone.

The clause ve.lo tih.Yeh le.'i.Shah ("and to him she will become for a wife") uses the preposition le twice — once marking possession ("to him") and once marking the resulting role ("for a wife") — a construction that expresses "becoming" rather than a simple equative "is." The causal clause Ta.chat 'a.Sher 'i.Nah ("because that he has humiliated her", H8478J + H0834A + H6031B) uses the piel perfect of 'i.Nah, an intensive stem denoting the forceful nature of the prior act, distinguishing it from the plainer qal participle sho.Khev used earlier for the act of lying together. The final restriction, lo yu.Khal shale.Chah kol ya.Mav ("he will not be able to send her away, all his days"), pairs a negated imperfect with a piel infinitive, producing a durative prohibition that extends across the man's lifetime, marked explicitly by kol ya.Mav ("all his days", H3605 + H3117G).

Differences between versions

The LXX specifies the silver as dídrachma ("didrachms"), a concrete coin-unit not present in the Hebrew, which reads only Ka.sef ("silver", H3701G) after the numeral. The Vulgate renders the amount as quinquaginta siclos argenti ("fifty shekels of silver"), supplying "shekels" as an interpretive unit likewise absent from the Hebrew wording itself. The LXX's ἀνθ' ὧν ἐταπείνωσεν αὐτήν ("in return for having humbled her") and the Vulgate's quia humiliavit illam ("because he humbled her") both render the causal Ta.chat 'a.Sher 'i.Nah clause, though the LXX preposition emphasizes recompense/exchange while the Vulgate's quia is straightforwardly causal.