Deuteronomy 25:8

Summary

The verse describes a legal procedure: the elders of a city will summon a man, speak to him, and if he stands up and declares that he does not wish to take a woman (as wife, in context of levirate marriage), his refusal is verbally recorded. The sentence is built as a chain of sequential actions culminating in a direct quotation of his refusal.

Key words

• ka.re.'u ("they will summon", H7121G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing a chain of future-time actions begun earlier in the passage; the plural subject anticipates zik.nei ("elders").
• zik.nei ("elders of", H2205G) — masculine plural construct, syntactically bound to "his city," identifying the summoning body as a collective of elders rather than a single official.
• 'a.Mad ("he will stand firm", H5975G) — qal sequential perfect; marks a distinct physical/legal action (standing) before the act of speaking, forming its own link in the verbal chain.
• cha.Fatz.ti ("I desire", H2654A) — qal perfect, first person; embedded in direct speech, it reports the man's own stated position rather than a narrated fact.
• le.kach.Tah ("to take her", H3947I) — qal infinitive with pronominal suffix "her," expressing the purpose or object of the desire denied — the marrying action itself.

What the text says

The verse is structured as four consecutive verbs joined by the narrative ve. ("and", H9001) followed by sequential perfect forms: ka.re.'u ("they will summon"), di.be.Ru ("they will speak"), 'a.Mad ("he will stand firm"), 'a.Mar ("he will say"). This chain represents a single continuous sequence of future events, each action following automatically from the one before it — summoning leads to speaking, which leads to his standing, which leads to his declaration. The grammar itself encodes procedural order without needing separate connecting words for "then" or "after that."

The declaration itself is introduced by the negation lo' ("not", H3808) attached to cha.Fatz.ti ("I desire", H2654A), a first-person perfect verb reporting the man's own stated resolve. This is followed by the infinitive le.kach.Tah ("to take her", H3947I), which grammatically expresses the object of his refused desire — the infinitive with the pronominal suffix "her" packs subject, verb, and object into one compact form that Hebrew allows but that requires a full clause in English ("to take her").

Differences between versions

The LXX renders zik.nei ("elders of", H2205G) — a plural construct — with the singular collective noun γερουσία ("the council of elders"), naming a single institutional body where the Hebrew names individual elders in construct relation to the city.

The Vulgate condenses the two sequential Hebrew actions 'a.Mad ("he will stand firm", H5975G) and 'a.Mar ("he will say", H0559) into a single verb, "responderit" ("if he answers"), omitting a separate rendering of the standing action. The LXX preserves both actions with the participle στὰς ("having stood") plus the verb εἴπῃ ("he might say"), keeping the two-step structure closer to the Hebrew chain, though it shifts the mood to subjunctive to reflect a conditional sense not marked by distinct grammar in this Hebrew verse itself.