Deuteronomy 25:1

Summary

The verse establishes the procedural sequence for legal disputes: when a conflict (riv, H7379) arises between people, the parties approach the place of judgment, judgment is rendered, and the outcome is a formal declaration distinguishing the righteous party from the guilty party.

Key words

• riv ("a dispute", H7379) — masculine singular noun naming the legal conflict itself, the triggering condition of the verse.
• nigge.Shu ("they will draw near", H5066G) — niphal sequential perfect; the niphal stem gives a reflexive/passive nuance ("present themselves") rather than a plain active approach.
• mishPat ("place of judgment", H4941G) — masculine singular noun with definite article, denoting the judicial venue or process rather than an abstract concept of justice.
• hitzDiku ("they will declare righteous", H6663) — hiphil sequential perfect, causative form: the subject actively renders/declares someone righteous, not merely observes that they are so.
• hirShi'u ("they will condemn as guilty", H7561) — hiphil sequential perfect, parallel causative to hitzDiku, producing the formal declaration of guilt.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle ki ("if", H3588A) governing an imperfect verb yihYeh ("it will happen", H1961), setting up a hypothetical legal scenario: a riv ("dispute", H7379) occurring bein ("between", H0996G) anaShim ("people", H0582). The remainder of the verse consists of a chain of sequential perfect verbs — nigGeshu, shefaTu, hitzDiku, hirShi'u — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001). This verb chain describes a fixed sequence of events following the initial condition: the parties draw near, judgment occurs, and the judicial outcome is announced in two parallel causative (hiphil) verbs.

The pairing of hitzDiku ("they will declare righteous", H6663) with its object ha-tzaDik ("the righteous [one]", H6662) and hirShi'u ("they will condemn as guilty", H7561) with ha-raSha' ("the guilty [one]", H7563) forms a grammatical parallelism: both use the direct object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) followed by a definite adjective/noun. The hiphil stem in both verbs indicates that the action is not a description of an inherent state but a declarative, causative act performed by the judging party — the text presents the outcome as an official pronouncement rather than a discovery of pre-existing moral status.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew mishPat ("place of judgment", H4941G) is rendered in the LXX as κρίσιν ("judgment/trial"), shifting from a spatial/institutional term to an abstract judicial process. The Vulgate renders the same clause with interpellaverint judices ("they shall have appealed to the judges"), introducing the noun "judges" explicitly, which is not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew text, where the judging agents remain the unstated subject of the verb shefaTu ("they will judge", H8199).