Deuteronomy 24:21

Summary

The verse instructs that when a person harvests grapes from their vineyard, they are not to go back over it to gather what remains. What is left after the harvest belongs to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

Key words

• tiv.Tzor ("you will gather grapes", H1219) — qal imperfect, describing the main harvesting action of the vineyard owner.
• te.'o.Lel ("you will glean", H5953B) — piel imperfect, an intensive verb form indicating a repeated or thorough secondary picking-over of the vines, which is here negated.
• 'a.cha.Rei.kha ("behind you", H0310A + H9031) — construct plural noun with pronominal suffix, marking the space or vines left in the wake of the initial harvest.
• la.Ger ("to the sojourner", H9005 + H1616) — preposition + article + noun, identifying one of the three beneficiaries of what is left behind.
• yih.Yeh ("it will belong", H1961, qal imperfect, third person) — the final verb of the sentence, assigning ownership of the remainder to the three named groups.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle ki ("for/if", H3588A), setting up a circumstance: the moment of grape harvesting. The verb tiv.Tzor ("you will gather grapes", H1219) is a straightforward qal imperfect describing the ordinary act of harvesting one's karme-kha ("your vineyard", H3754 + H9021). The prohibition that follows uses lo' ("not", H3808) with te.'o.Lel ("you will glean", H5953B), a piel (intensive) form. The piel stem here suggests a deliberate, thorough action of going back over the vines a second time — the text forbids not casual oversight but an intensive re-harvesting. This action is located spatially by 'acharekha ("behind you", H0310A), literally the vines already passed over.

The second half of the verse shifts to naming the recipients of what remains: la-Ger ("to the sojourner", H1616), la-Yatom ("to the fatherless one", H3490), and ve-la-'Almanah ("and to the widow", H0490), each introduced by the preposition la- ("to/for", H9005) with the definite article. The final verb yihyeh ("it will belong", H1961), a qal imperfect third-person form, has no explicit subject stated in the Hebrew text beyond "it" — grammatically referring back to what is left after the harvest — and assigns that remainder to the three groups listed. The structure places the negated action (what the owner must not do) before the positive assignment (to whom the leftover belongs), framing the leftover produce as automatically allocated rather than voluntarily given.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders te.'o.Lel ("you will glean", H5953B) with ἐπανατρυγήσεις ("you will re-gather the grapes"), making explicit the repeated harvesting action that the Hebrew piel form implies more compactly. The Vulgate's "non colliges remanentes racemos" ("you will not collect the remaining clusters") similarly unpacks the intensive sense into a descriptive phrase about remaining grape clusters, adding the word "remanentes" ("remaining") not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew.