Deuteronomy 28:53

Summary

Deuteronomy 28:53 describes a besieged population being reduced to eating the flesh of their own children, described as "fruit of the womb" and "flesh of sons and daughters" that Yehovah had given them. The verse is framed by the causes of this act: siege (matzor, H4692) and distress (matzoq, H4689) inflicted by an enemy.

Key words

• 'a.khal.Ta ("you will eat", H0398) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain from the preceding verses; grammatically a completed-sequence action, "and you shall eat."
• fe.ri ("fruit of", H6529) — masculine singular construct, bound to vitnekha ("your womb", H0990H), forming the idiom "fruit of your womb," i.e., offspring.
• ba.Nei.kha / ve.no.Tei.kha ("your sons" / "and your daughters", H1121A / H1323G) — masculine and feminine plural construct nouns with pronominal suffix, both governed by besar ("flesh of", H1320), specifying whose flesh is eaten.
• ya.Tzik ("he will bring distress", H6693) — hiphil imperfect, a causative verb: the enemy actively causes distress, not merely experiences it; imperfect aspect marks this as future or ongoing action relative to the siege.
• 'o.ye.Ve.kha ("your enemy", H0341) — qal participle construct with suffix, literally "the one hating/being hostile to you," used substantively as "enemy."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a single continuous clause introduced by the narrative vav on 'a.khal.Ta, which links this verse to the sequence of curses preceding it. The direct object is doubled in apposition: feri vitnekha ("fruit of your womb") is restated more explicitly as besar baneikha uvenoteikha ("flesh of your sons and your daughters"), both construct chains piling noun upon noun without a verb, which is typical of Biblical Hebrew's dense genitive constructions. The relative clause 'asher natan-lekha Yehovah 'eloheikha ("whom Yehovah your God has given you") uses a qal perfect, marking this as a completed past act — the gift of children — now grimly reversed within the same sentence.

The second half of the verse explains the circumstances with two paired nouns, matzor ("siege", H4692) and matzoq ("distress", H4689), connected by u- ("and", H9002), followed by a second relative clause using the hiphil imperfect yatziq ("he will bring distress"). The hiphil stem marks causation: the enemy ('oyevekha, a substantivized participle) is the one who causes (yatziq) the matzoq to occur, creating a wordplay between the noun matzoq and the verb built on the same root (Y-TZ-Q), which the English glosses "distress" / "he will bring distress" cannot fully preserve.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew relative clause 'asher natan-lekha ("whom he has given you") modifies "sons and daughters," while the LXX renders it as ὅσα ἔδωκέν σοι ("as many as he gave you"), a neuter plural construction that shifts the referent slightly toward "whatever/however many he gave you." The Vulgate's quas dederit uses a subjunctive perfect, softening the certainty of the Hebrew qal perfect natan. The Hebrew 'oyevekha is singular ("your enemy"), matched by the LXX singular ὁ ἐχθρός σου and Vulgate hostis tuus, though the modern Spanish SBLIBRE translation renders it as plural ("tus enemigos"), a divergence introduced at the translation level rather than in the source texts.