Deuteronomy 25:5

Summary

The verse establishes the legal scenario of levirate marriage: when brothers live together and one dies without a son, his widow may not marry a man outside the family. Instead, her husband's brother (yavam) is to have relations with her, take her as wife, and perform the duty of yibbum toward her.

Key words

• yesh'vu ("they will dwell", H3427) — qal imperfect plural, sets the conditional frame ("if brothers dwell together").
• ben ("a son", H1121A) — construct form used with 'ein to express "there is no son to him," the triggering condition of the law.
• yevamah ("her husband's brother", H2993) — masculine singular construct with 3rd-person feminine suffix, naming the specific male relative obligated to act.
• yavo' ("he will go/come in", H0935G) — qal imperfect, denotes the physical union between the brother-in-law and the widow.
• yibbemah ("he will act as husband's brother for her", H2992) — piel sequential perfect, the intensive verbal form built from the same root as yevamah, naming the legal-marital act itself (the technical term for levirate duty).

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle ki ("if", H3588A) governing a chain of sequential perfect verbs (u-Met, u-lekachah, ve-yibbemah) that lay out the procedure step by step once the initial condition is met: brothers dwelling yachdav ("together", H3162B), one dying, and no ben ("son", H1121A) existing for him. The absence of a son is expressed through the construct phrase ben 'ein lo — literally "a son there-is-not to-him" — a common Hebrew way of marking non-existence tied to a possessor via the preposition-suffix combination lo ("to him").

The prohibition on the widow marrying an outsider uses the phrase ha-chutzah le-'ish zar — "outside, to a strange man" — with zar ("strange", H2114A) marking the man as external to the family unit, not merely unfamiliar. The obligation then falls on yevamah ("her husband's brother", H2993), a construct noun built on the same root as the piel verb yibbemah at the verse's end. This root-repetition (noun yevamah / verb yibbemah) frames the entire procedure: the noun names the relational role, the piel verb names the enacted duty. The verb yavo' ("he will go/come in", H0935G) describes entering the physical union, distinct from lekachah ("he will take", H3947I), which describes the formal act of taking her as wife.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yevamah with a descriptive phrase, "ὁ ἀδελφὸς τοῦ ἀνδρὸς αὐτῆς" ("the brother of her husband"), rather than a single technical term, and translates the final piel verb yibbemah as "συνοικήσει αὐτῇ" ("he will dwell with her"), a more general expression than the Hebrew's specialized levirate term. The Vulgate similarly uses "suscitabit semen fratris sui" ("he will raise up the seed of his brother") for the same final verb, introducing an explicit reference to offspring not present in the Hebrew verb itself, which denotes the act of levirate marriage rather than its purpose.