Deuteronomy 24:4

Summary

The verse states that a woman's first husband, having formally divorced her, is prohibited from remarrying her once she has been through a second marriage and become "defiled" in this technical sense. The text grounds this prohibition in two reasons: the act is called an "abomination" before Yehovah, and re-marrying her would cause the land itself to incur guilt.

Key words

• yukhal ("he will be able", H3201) — qal imperfect, expressing capacity/permission rather than mere futurity; the negation lo + this verb creates a prohibition framed as impossibility ("he will not be able to...").
• shillechah ("he sent away", H7971) — piel (intensive) perfect; the piel stem of this root is the standard technical term for formal divorce, distinct from a simple act of "sending."
• huttamma'ah ("she has been declared unclean", H2930) — a passive/rare verbal stem, perfect tense; the passive voice places the woman as the one acted upon rather than the agent of defilement.
• to'evah ("abomination", H8441) — feminine singular noun functioning as predicate nominative with the pronoun hi ("she/that"), naming the category of the act itself.
• tachati' ("you will cause to sin", H2398) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, second person masculine singular; the causative stem makes the human addressee the one who would bring about the land's guilt, not the land acting on its own.

What the text says

The sentence's backbone is a chain of infinitives following yukhal: lashuv ("to return", H7725), leqachtah ("to take her", H3947), lihyot ("to become", H1961), each governed by the preposition le-. This stacking expresses a sequence of purpose — the first husband is barred from the whole progression of returning, taking her back, and her becoming his wife again. The temporal clause acharei asher huttamma'ah ("after that she has been declared unclean") uses the passive stem to describe her status without specifying the divorced husband as agent of that status. The causal clause ki to'evah hi lifnei Yehovah explains the prohibition by naming the act "abomination" before Yehovah's presence (lifnei, "before the face of", H6440). The final clause shifts addressee and verb: lo tachati' uses a hiphil (causative) form, syntactically making "you" (the community/individual) the one who would cause "the land" (ha'aretz, H776) to incur sin-guilt, rather than the land sinning independently.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the final prohibition as οὐ μιανεῖτε τὴν γῆν ("you shall not defile the land"), using a defilement verb rather than a sin-causing one, and shifts to second-person plural, where the Hebrew tachati' is second-person singular. The Vulgate's ne peccare facias ("lest you cause to sin") more closely mirrors the Hebrew causative sense of chata (H2398). The Vulgate also adds a possessive, "terram tuam" ("your land"), where the Hebrew has simply ha'aretz ("the land") without a possessive suffix.