Deuteronomy 25:11

Summary

Deuteronomy 25:11 describes a legal scenario: when men are fighting with one another, and the wife of one of them intervenes to save her husband from his attacker by seizing him by the genitals. The verse sets up a conditional case (a casuistic law) that is resolved in the following verse.

Key words

• yi.na.Tzu ("they will be struggling together", H5327A) — niphal imperfect, giving the verb a passive/reflexive sense ("struggle with each other") and marking the action as ongoing or future, appropriate for a legal protasis.
• ka.re.Vah ("she will draw near", H7126G) — qal sequential perfect (vav + perfect), continuing the narrative chain begun by the conditional ki- ("if", H3588A); this construction is typical of Hebrew casuistic law, stringing together sequential actions.
• ha.Tzil ("rescue", H5337) — hiphil infinitive, causative in force ("to cause rescue/deliverance"), expressing the wife's purpose in approaching.
• ma.Ke. ("the one who is striking", H5221) — hiphil participle in construct, "the striker of him," describing the attacker in an ongoing action, contrasted with the completed acts of the wife.
• m.vu.Sha ("genitals", H4016) — masculine plural noun in construct with the pronominal suffix "his," a somewhat euphemistic or specific anatomical term naming the object of her grasp.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle ki ("if", H3588A), introducing a casuistic legal scenario common in Deuteronomic law. The initial clause uses the niphal verb yi.na.Tzu ("they will be struggling together", H5327A), which frames the fight as mutual and reciprocal rather than a one-sided attack — grammatically reinforced by yach.Dav ("together", H3162B) and the paired phrase 'ish ve-'a.Chi ("a man and his brother/countryman", H0376I + H0251I), a Hebrew idiom for expressing mutuality ("one man and another").

The narrative then shifts into a chain of sequential perfect verbs joined by the vav consecutive: ka.re.Vah ("she will draw near", H7126G), sha.le.Chah ("she will stretch out", H7971K), and he.che.Zi.kah ("she will take hold", H2388H). This chain narrates the wife's actions as a single continuous sequence of events following from the initial conditional setup, a hallmark of Hebrew legal narrative style where each successive perfect verb builds on the prior one rather than standing as an independent clause.

The purpose clause le-ha.Tzil ("to rescue", H5337), built on the hiphil infinitive, expresses the wife's causative intention — to bring about her husband's deliverance — from mi-yad ma.Ke.hu ("from the hand of the one striking him", H3027G + H5221), where ma.Ke. is a hiphil participle denoting the ongoing action of the striker. The final verb, he.che.Zi.kah ("she will take hold", H2388H), governs the prepositional phrase bi-m.vu.Sha.v ("on his genitals", H4016), specifying the precise physical act that becomes the legal condition addressed in the following verse.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'ish ve-'a.Chiv ("a man and his brother", H0376I/H0251I) more generically as ἄνθρωπος μετὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ, preserving the mutuality but using standard Greek kinship/generic vocabulary. The Vulgate specifies "duo" ("two [men]"), making explicit the two-party nature of the fight, which the Hebrew conveys implicitly through yach.Dav ("together", H3162B) and the mutual verb form. Where the Hebrew m.vu.Sha ("genitals", H4016) is anatomically direct, the Vulgate's "verenda" ("things to be revered/private parts") and the LXX's "τῶν διδύμων" ("the twin parts", i.e., testicles) both use euphemistic terms rather than an exact lexical match.