Deuteronomy 28:41

Summary

The verse states that the addressee will father sons and daughters, but those children will not remain his because they will be taken into captivity. It is part of a series of curses describing loss of what one produces or possesses.

Key words

• ba.Nim ("sons", H1121A) — masculine plural noun, paired with the next word to form the merism "sons and daughters."
• to.Lid ("you will father", H3205) — Hiphil (causative) imperfect, second person masculine singular; the causative stem marks the subject as the one who causes offspring to come into being, i.e., "cause to be born" rather than simply "bear."
• yih.Yu ("they will belong", H1961) — Qal imperfect, third person masculine plural of the verb "to be," here governing the prepositional phrase la.kh ("to you") to express possession: "they will not be to you."
• ye.le.Khu ("they will go", H1980G) — Qal imperfect, third person masculine plural, describing the future movement of the children into captivity.
• She.vi ("captivity", H7628A) — masculine singular noun with the article prefixed (ba., "in the"), naming the state/place into which the children go.

What the text says

The verse opens with the object pair ba.Nim ("sons", H1121A) and va.Not ("daughters", H1323G), placed before the verb to.Lid ("you will father", H3205). This word order fronts the offspring as the topic before stating the action that produces them, a common Hebrew pattern for emphasis. The Hiphil form of to.Lid marks the subject as causing the birth, a nuance the English "father" or Spanish "engendrar" approximates but does not grammatically mark as causative the way the Hebrew verb stem does.

The second clause, ve.lo yih.Yu la.kh ("and they will not belong to you"), uses the verb yih.Yu ("they will belong", H1961) — literally "they will be" — combined with the preposition la.kh ("to you") to express possession rather than existence. This is the standard Hebrew construction for "to have," so the negated form communicates loss of possession rather than the children ceasing to exist.

The final clause, introduced by ki ("for/because", H3588A), gives the reason: ye.le.Khu ba.She.vi ("they will go into the captivity", H1980G, H7628A). The noun She.vi carries the definite article, referring to a specific, known captivity rather than captivity in general.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the possession clause as ouk esontai ("they will not be"), omitting an explicit equivalent to the Hebrew la.kh ("to you"), which softens the "belonging to you" nuance present in the Hebrew construction. The Vulgate's non frueris eis ("you will not enjoy them") introduces the idea of "enjoyment" or "use," which is not a direct lexical match for the Hebrew yih.Yu la.kh ("they will not be to you"), though it conveys a similar sense of loss of relationship. The Hebrew ba.She.vi ("into the captivity", with definite article) is rendered in the LXX as en aichmalosia ("in captivity," without an article in the Greek phrase as given), a minor difference in definiteness marking.