Deuteronomy 25:2

Summary

The verse describes the legal procedure for corporal punishment: if the guilty party is judged "worthy of striking," the judge orders him to lie down, and he is struck in the judge's presence, with the number of blows corresponding to the severity of his wrongdoing.

Key words

• bin ("son of", H1121G) — construct form of "son"; combined with the infinitive that follows, it forms the idiom "son of striking," meaning "one deserving to be struck."
• ha.Kot ("striking", H5221) — hiphil infinitive; the causative stem indicates the act of causing blows to fall, used here abstractly as "the act of being struck."
• hi.pi.L ("he will make lie down", H5307G) — hiphil sequential perfect; the causative form shows the judge is the one who causes the guilty man's body to be positioned for punishment, not merely observing it happen.
• sho.Fet ("judge", H8199) — qal participle used substantively; participles in Hebrew frequently function as agent-nouns ("the one who judges" = "judge").
• hi.Ka.h ("he will strike", H5221) — hiphil sequential perfect, same root as ha.Kot; grammatically third-person singular active, but the identity of the striking agent is not explicitly named in this clause.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative sequence marker ve. ("and") attached to ha.Yah ("it will be", H1961), a formula common in legal/case texts to introduce a conditional scenario. The condition itself, 'im-bin hakkot ha.rasha' ("if [the] guilty one [is] a son of striking"), uses the construct idiom bin + infinitive to express deservingness — literally "a son of striking" functions as "one who merits being struck," paralleling other Hebrew idioms where "son of X" denotes possessing the quality X.

The main clause has two causative (hiphil) verbs in sequence: hi.pi.L ("he will make [him] lie down") with the judge (ha.shofet) as explicit subject, followed by hi.Ka.h ("he will strike [him]"). The Hebrew text does not repeat "the judge" as subject of the second verb; grammatically the subject could continue to be the judge, or it could shift to an unstated third party who executes the blows while the judge supervises "before him" (le.fanav, H6440H). The final phrase, ke.dei rish.'a.to be.mispar ("according to the sufficiency of his wickedness, by number"), ties the quantity of blows (mispar, "number", H4557) directly to the measure of the offense (rish'ato, "his wickedness", H7564).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the causing-to-lie-down and striking sequence with a single verb, καθιεῖς ("you will set/place"), omitting the explicit repetition of the striking action found in the Hebrew's two hiphil verbs. The Vulgate uses plural verbs (prosternent, "they will prostrate"; facient verberari, "they will cause to be beaten"), which shifts the grammatical subject from a single judge to an unspecified plural group, differing from the Hebrew's singular verb forms tied to ha.shofet. Modern translations such as the BSB render hi.Ka.h with a passive construction ("be flogged"), which smooths over the Hebrew's active third-person form without specifying who performs the strike.