Deuteronomy 28:4

Summary

Deuteronomy 28:4 lists agricultural and reproductive blessings using a single participle, baruch ("blessed", H1288), that governs five parallel construct phrases: the fruit of the womb, of the ground, of livestock, and the specific offspring terms for cattle and sheep. The verse enumerates categories of increase — human, agricultural, and animal — tied together grammatically by repeated "fruit of" (peri) and by possessive suffixes referring to the addressee.

Key words

• baruch ("[will be] blessed", H1288) — qal passive participle, masculine singular; it stands alone at the head of the verse and applies to all following items, without a repeated verb for each clause.
• peri ("fruit of", H6529) — masculine singular construct, repeated three times (womb, ground, livestock), creating anaphoric parallelism across the first three clauses.
• shegar ("young of", H7698) — feminine singular construct, paired with alafeykha ("your cattle", H0504), a specific term for animal offspring distinct from the general peri.
• ashterot ("young ones of", H6251) — feminine plural construct, paired with tzonekha ("your sheep", H6629G), parallel in function to shegar but for flocks rather than cattle.
• -kha ("your", H9021) — masculine singular pronominal suffix attached to every noun in construct, anchoring all five blessings to a single addressee.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence has no repeated finite verb; baruch at the beginning functions as the sole predicate, syntactically extending its force across all five construct chains that follow, joined by the conjunction ve- ("and", H9002). This construction produces a cumulative listing effect: womb, ground, and livestock are introduced with the recurring word peri ("fruit of"), while the last two items — offspring of cattle and offspring of sheep — use different, more specialized construct nouns, shegar and ashterot, rather than repeating peri. This shift in vocabulary marks a move from the general category "fruit" to technical pastoral terms for newborn animals, a nuance not visible in translations that render all five items with the same word "offspring" or "produce."

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete text) reduces the list to three items: τὰ ἔκγονα τῆς κοιλίας σου ("the offspring of your womb"), τὰ βουκόλια τῶν βοῶν σου ("the herds of your oxen"), and τὰ ποίμνια τῶν προβάτων σου ("the flocks of your sheep"). It omits a distinct rendering for peri adamatekha ("fruit of your ground", H0127G) and merges the livestock and offspring terms into two general animal categories. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew's five-part structure closely: fructus ventris, fructus terrae, fructus jumentorum, greges armentorum, caulae ovium, preserving the fivefold division and matching the Hebrew's construct chains more directly than the LXX.