Deuteronomy 24:17

Summary

Deuteronomy 24:17 contains two prohibitions addressed to an individual (second person masculine singular): not to distort the legal claim of a sojourner or a fatherless person, and not to take a widow's garment as collateral for a debt. Both clauses use the negative particle plus an imperfect verb, a common form for binding prohibitions in this legal corpus.

Key words

• tatteh ("you will turn aside", H5186) — Hiphil (causative) imperfect: not merely "to turn" but "to cause to turn/bend," applied here to a legal claim.
• mishpat ("justice of", H4941H) — masculine singular construct, meaning it must be followed by a noun it governs; here it governs ger.
• ger ("a sojourner", H1616) — absolute noun functioning as the object of the construct chain begun by mishpat.
• yatom ("a fatherless one", H3490) — appears immediately after ger with no conjunction linking them in the Hebrew.
• tachavol ("you will take as pledge", H2254A) — Qal (simple) imperfect, governing beged ("garment of", H899B) in construct with almanah ("a widow", H490).

What the text says

The verse is built as two parallel negative commands, each using lo' ("not", H3808) followed by an imperfect verb, a standard pattern for prohibitive legislation. The first clause places mishpat ("justice of") in construct with ger ("a sojourner"), and then yatom ("a fatherless one") follows directly, with no conjunction ve- ("and") joining the two nouns. This construction is grammatically ambiguous: it can be read either as two distinct legal subjects (the sojourner, the fatherless) both governed by mishpat, or as a tighter description of a single figure, "a fatherless sojourner." The Hebrew text itself does not resolve this through morphology alone.

The second clause shifts verbs to tachavol (Qal, "you will take as pledge") and introduces a new construct chain, beged almanah ("garment of a widow"), specifying the physical object—a widow's garment—that may not be seized as security for a loan. The Hiphil form of tatteh in the first clause differs functionally from the Qal tachavol in the second: the first denotes causing a legal judgment to bend, the second denotes a direct physical action of seizing collateral.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) renders the passage as a single clause, "οὐκ ἐκκλινεῖς κρίσιν προσηλύτου καὶ ὀρφανοῦ καὶ χήρας" ("you shall not turn aside the judgment of a sojourner and of an orphan and of a widow"), listing three parties joined by καὶ ("and") within one prohibition, and the data given does not show a separate clause corresponding to the Hebrew tachavol...beged almanah about seizing a widow's garment as pledge. The Vulgate preserves two clauses matching the Hebrew structure but inserts "et" ("advenae et pupilli") between "sojourner" and "orphan," making explicit a conjunction that is absent in the Hebrew between ger and yatom.