Deuteronomy 24:3

Summary

This verse continues a legal conditional sentence about a woman's second marriage: if the "latter man" comes to hate her, he must write her a divorce document, place it in her hand, and send her from his house — or alternatively, if that latter husband dies. The verse describes the required sequence of actions for divorce or the alternative case of death.

Key words

• sene'ah ("he will hate", H8130) — qal sequential perfect; this verb form continues a chain of hypothetical actions begun earlier in the conditional sentence (vv. 1–2), each linked by ve ("and").
• 'ish ha'acharon ("the latter man", H0376G + H0314) — noun with adjective, both carrying the definite article; identifies the second husband as distinct from the first husband mentioned earlier in the unit.
• sefer kerituy ("document of divorce", H5612A + H3748) — noun in construct chain, literally "document of cutting off/separation"; sefer is construct, meaning "a document of X" where X is kerituy.
• shilechah ("he will send away", H7971I) — piel (intensive) stem, sequential perfect; the piel form intensifies the basic sense of "send" into a decisive act of dismissal from the household.
• yamut ("he will die", H4191) — qal imperfect, distinct in form from the surrounding sequential perfects; this shift signals the alternative branch of the condition ("or if he dies") rather than a continuation of required actions.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects (ve + perfect verb), a construction typical of case-law style in the Torah: each verb — sene'ah ("he will hate"), katav ("he will write"), natan ("he will give"), shilechah ("he will send away") — continues a single hypothetical scenario introduced earlier. This chain lists the required procedural steps if the second husband chooses to divorce the woman: hating her, writing the sefer kerituy ("document of divorce"), placing it beyadah ("in her hand"), and sending her mibeito ("from his house").

After this chain, the particle 'o khi ("or if") introduces a second possibility using the imperfect yamut ("he will die") instead of a perfect — grammatically marking this as a separate, alternative circumstance (the husband's death) rather than another step in the same sequence of required actions. The relative clause 'asher lekachah lo le'ishah ("who took her for himself as a wife") specifies which "latter man" is meant, using a perfect verb (lekachah, "he has taken") to describe a prior, completed act of marriage.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders shilechah ("he will send away", piel) with the compound verb ἐξαποστελεῖ ("he will send out from"), matching the intensive/directional sense of the Hebrew piel plus the following min ("from"). The Vulgate adds the word "certe" ("certainly") in "vel certe mortuus fuerit" ("or he will certainly have died"), an emphasis not present in the Hebrew 'o khi yamut ("or if he dies"). The BSB translates ha'ish ha'acharon as "the second man," an interpretive rendering of "the latter man" that clarifies sequence but is not a literal equivalent of 'acharon ("latter", H0314).