Deuteronomy 28:43

Summary

The verse describes a reversal of status between the ger ("sojourner", H1616) living within the community and the addressee ("you"). The sojourner is said to rise continually higher, while the addressee sinks continually lower, expressed through a doubled directional construction in Hebrew.

Key words

• Ger ("sojourner", H1616) — masculine singular noun, denoting a resident foreigner living among the people, distinct from a native.
• Yaaleh ("he will go up", H5927G) — qal imperfect, third person, expressing an ongoing or repeated future action of ascending.
• Ma'lah ("up", H4605) — appears twice in sequence (ma'lah ma'lah), a cardinal/adverbial form with directional force, doubled for intensive or progressive meaning.
• Tered ("you will go down", H3381) — qal imperfect, second person masculine, mirroring yaaleh but with descending motion.
• Matah ("downwards", H4295) — also doubled (matah matah), parallel in form and function to ma'lah ma'lah.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a clear grammatical parallelism between two clauses joined by ve- ("and", H9002). The first clause has ha-ger ("the sojourner") as subject, modified by the relative clause asher be-qirbekha ("who is in your midst"), with the verb yaaleh ("he will go up") followed by the doubled adverb ma'lah ma'lah. The second clause reverses the roles: ve-atah ("and you") is the explicit pronoun subject, paired with tered ("you will go down") and the doubled adverb matah matah.

The repetition of the directional words ma'lah and matah — each written twice — is a Hebrew grammatical device conveying intensification or a progressive/repeated sense, rendered in some translations as "higher and higher" and "lower and lower" (as in BSB) rather than a single "very high" or "very low." The directional he suffix (H9011) attached to ma'lah and matah marks movement "toward" a direction, reinforcing the sense of continuous motion rather than a static position.

The explicit use of the independent pronoun atah ("you", H0859A) before the verb tered, when Hebrew verb morphology already encodes the subject, adds emphasis to the contrast between the two subjects — the ger rising versus "you" descending.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the doubled Hebrew adverbs ma'lah ma'lah and matah matah with the Greek doubled ἄνω ἄνω ("up up") and κάτω κάτω ("down down"), preserving the repetition. The Vulgate instead renders the doubled Hebrew construction with a single intensifying clause, ascendet... eritque sublimior ("he will ascend... and will be higher") and descendes, et eris inferior ("you will descend, and will be lower"), converting the repeated adverb into a result clause rather than reduplicated adverbs. The RV1909 similarly uses single intensifiers ("muy alto," "muy bajo") rather than repeating the directional term, while the BSB captures the repetition through "higher and higher" and "lower and lower."