Deuteronomy 28:24

Summary

The verse describes Yehovah turning the rain that should fall on the land into dust and powder, falling from the sky until the addressee is destroyed. It reverses the expected agricultural blessing of rain into an image of dry, choking particles descending instead of water.

Key words

• yiTen ("he will make/give", H5414I) — qal imperfect, third person masculine; the subject Yehovah performs an ongoing/future action of "giving," here governing the noun phrase that follows as its object.
• metar ("rain of", H4306) — masculine singular construct, linked to 'artzekha ("your land") to form the phrase "the rain of your land," identifying what is being transformed.
• 'avaq ("dust", H0080) and 'afar ("dust", H6083) — two masculine singular nouns joined by ve ("and", H9002), standing in apposition to metar, redefining what falls from the sky.
• yered ("it will come down", H3381) — qal imperfect, describing the future/ongoing descent of the dust from hashamayim ("the heavens", H8064).
• hishamedakh ("your being destroyed", H8045) — niphal infinitive with second-person suffix, expressing passive/reflexive destruction; introduced by 'ad ("until", H5704) to mark the endpoint of the process.

What the text says

The sentence opens with yiten Yehovah ("Yehovah will give/make"), whose direct object is marked by 'et (H0853) and consists of the construct phrase metar 'artzekha ("the rain of your land"). Immediately after, two nouns—'avaq and 'afar—stand in apposition to this object, meaning the "rain" itself is redefined as "dust and dust/powder" rather than water. This construction lets the verb yiten carry the sense of "turn into" or "give as," since the object it produces is not liquid rain but particulate matter.

The second clause, min-hashamayim yered 'aleikha, is a separate finite clause: "from the heavens it will come down on you," using the qal imperfect yered to describe the falling action explicitly, reinforcing what the first clause implied. The final phrase, 'ad hishamedakh, uses the niphal infinitive construct with a pronominal suffix, a grammatical form that expresses the process of being destroyed as a temporal boundary — "until your being destroyed" — rather than a finite verb with a subject, giving the ending a durative, ongoing sense of "until this keeps happening to you."

Differences between versions

The LXX adds ὁ θεός σου ("your God") after Κύριος, an element not present in the Hebrew. Where the Hebrew has a single niphal infinitive hishamedakh ("until your being destroyed"), the LXX uses two verbs, ἐκτρίψῃ ("wipe out") and ἀπολέσῃ ... ἐν τάχει ("destroy... quickly"), intensifying the ending. The Vulgate renders 'afar as cinis ("ash") rather than a second word for "dust," and uses conteraris ("you are ground down/crushed") for the concluding verb, differing in nuance from both the Hebrew "destroyed" and the LXX's double phrase.