Deuteronomy 24:6

Summary

The verse prohibits taking a rechayim ("a hand-mill", H7347) together with its rakhev ("an upper millstone", H7393H) as a pledge for debt. The reason given is that doing so would mean taking a nefesh ("a life", H5315H) itself as pledge, since the mill is used to prepare daily food.

Key words

• yachavol ("anyone will take as pledge", H2254A) — qal imperfect, 3rd person, expressing a general prohibition about future/ongoing action; opens the verse with lo' ("not", H3808) to form the negative command.
• rechayim ("a hand-mill", H7347) — masculine dual noun; the dual form reflects that a hand-mill is physically composed of two stones (lower and upper) functioning as one implement.
• rakhev ("an upper millstone", H7393H) — masculine singular, joined to rechayim by the conjunction va ("and", H9002), specifying one particular component of the mill.
• nefesh ("a life", H5315H) — feminine singular noun; here it names the object that is figuratively pledged, i.e., the mill is equated with the life it sustains.
• chovel ("taking as pledge", H2254A) — qal participle, masculine singular; repeats the same root as yachavol, forming a frame (imperfect...participle) around the clause and stressing the ongoing nature of the pledging act described in the reason clause.

What the text says

The sentence is built in two parts joined by the particle ki ("for", H3588A), which here functions as a causal/explanatory conjunction: a prohibition (lo'-yachavol rechayim va-rakhev, "one shall not take the hand-mill and upper millstone as pledge") followed by its rationale (ki-nefesh hu chovel, "for it is a life he is pledging"). The rationale clause places emphasis through word order: nefesh ("a life", H5315H) comes first, before the subject pronoun hu ("that", H1931) and the participle chovel, foregrounding what is really being seized.

The repetition of the root H2254A — once as the finite imperfect yachavol and once as the participle chovel — creates a grammatical echo: the same act of "pledging" named at the start is renamed at the end, but now explicitly equated with pledging a "life" rather than an object. The dual form of rechayim already encodes the two-stone nature of a hand-mill, and the added rakhev specifies the upper stone as a component that must not be removed either, since without both stones the mill cannot function.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew joins rechayim and rakhev with the conjunction va ("and"), presenting them as two elements of one prohibition. The LXX renders this with oude ("nor"), listing mylon ("mill") and epimylion ("upper millstone") as separate items neither of which may be taken. The Vulgate expands the two Hebrew terms into "inferiorem et superiorem molam" ("the lower and the upper millstone"), making explicit a lower/upper distinction not lexically marked in the Hebrew, where only the upper stone (rakhev) is separately named. The Spanish translations (RV1909, SBLIBRE) follow this same lower/upper reading. For nefesh, the Vulgate reads "animam suam opposuit tibi" ("he has pledged his soul to you"), while the BSB interprets nefesh as "livelihood" rather than "life," reflecting the same Hebrew noun read with different semantic emphasis.