Deuteronomy 28:55

Summary

This verse continues the description of extreme famine during military siege, stating that a man will withhold from his family members the flesh of his own children — food he himself is eating — because the siege and distress inflicted by the enemy have left him nothing else within the besieged towns.

Key words

• Tet ("giving", H5414G) — qal infinitive preceded by the preposition mi ("from"). The combination mi + infinitive typically expresses a negative result: "so as not to give" / "from giving."
• yokhel ("he will eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, marking an ongoing or future action: the man is depicted as actively consuming what he withholds from others.
• hish'ir ("he has left", H7604) — hiphil perfect of a causative verb, describing a completed state: nothing has been left over for him.
• yatzik ("he will bring distress", H6693) — hiphil imperfect, causative and future-oriented, describing the enemy's ongoing action of inflicting distress.
• matzor ("siege", H4692) and matzok ("distress", H4689) — two related masculine nouns joined by ve ("and", H9002), forming a paired expression for military encirclement and the suffering it produces.

What the text says

The clause opens with mi-Tet ("from giving"), a construction using the preposition mi (H9006) with the infinitive Tet (H5414G). This pattern in Biblical Hebrew often conveys a negative purpose or result — "so as not to give" — rather than a plain infinitive of purpose. The object of the withheld giving is le-'achad me-hem ("to one of them", H0259 + H9006), referring back to family members mentioned in the surrounding verses. What is withheld is mi-besar banav ("from the flesh of his sons", H1320 + H1121A), specified further by the relative clause asher yokhel ("which he will eat", H0398) — the imperfect verb indicating the man's own ongoing consumption of that same flesh.

The causal clause mi-beli hish'ir lo kol ("because he has left nothing for himself", H1097 + H7604) uses the hiphil perfect hish'ir, framing the total exhaustion of resources as an already-completed state at the time of the action described. The final section pairs matzor and matzok (H4692, H4689) — siege and distress — as the cause inflicted by oyivkha ("your enemy", H0341), using the hiphil imperfect yatzik (H6693) to mark the enemy's continuing infliction of pressure "in all your gates" (be-khol she'areikha, H8179H), i.e., within every town.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew mi-Tet construction implies a negative sense ("so as not to give"), which the Vulgate (ne det, "that he may not give") and modern renderings (BSB "refusing to share," SBLIBRE "no dará") make explicit. The Septuagint, by contrast, renders this opening as ὥστε δοῦναι ("so as to give"), without an explicit negative particle, producing a phrase that on its surface states the opposite outcome from the Hebrew and the Vulgate.