Deuteronomy 32:5

Summary

The verse describes a corrupted relationship: an unspecified agent has acted corruptly, and the text denies that certain persons are legitimate "children," attributing to them instead a "blemish" and describing them as a crooked, twisted generation. The Hebrew syntax of this verse is notably compressed and disjointed, which has produced significant translation variation.

Key words

• shiChet ("it has acted corruptly", H7843) — Piel perfect, 3rd masculine singular; the verb form intensifies the action ("thoroughly corrupted") but the text supplies no explicit grammatical subject for "he/it."
• lo' ("not", H3808) — a bare negation particle positioned between "to him" and "his sons," creating ambiguity about which following word it negates.
• baNav ("his sons/children", H1121A) — masculine plural noun in construct form with a 3ms suffix ("his"), meaning "sons of him."
• muMam ("their blemish", H3971B) — masculine singular noun in construct form with a 3mp suffix ("their"), literally "blemish of them."
• dor ("a generation", H1755) + 'iQesh ("perverse", H6141) + fetalTol ("crooked", H6618) — a noun followed by two coordinated adjectives, stacking near-synonymous descriptors of moral distortion.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause structure is unusually terse: a perfect verb (shiChet) stands without an explicit subject noun, followed by lo ("to him"), then the negation lo', then "his sons" (baNav), then "their blemish" (muMam), and finally the descriptive phrase "a crooked and twisted generation." The construct chains (baNav = "sons of him," muMam = "blemish of them") link nouns to pronominal suffixes rather than forming full independent clauses, which is part of why the verse reads as elliptical in Hebrew — verbs like "to be" must be supplied by the reader or translator to connect the pieces into a coherent sentence.

The doubling of 'iQesh ("perverse") and fetalTol ("crooked") at the end functions as a two-word intensifying description of "generation" (dor), stacking synonyms for moral distortion rather than adding new information.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the singular verb shiChet with the plural Greek verb ἡμάρτοσαν ("they sinned"), shifting the grammatical subject from an unspecified singular to a plural group. The Vulgate follows this same plural pattern with peccaverunt ("they sinned"). Both LXX and Vulgate also treat muMam not as the noun "their blemish" but as a descriptive quality: LXX μωμητά ("blemished ones") and Vulgate "in sordibus" ("in filth"), rather than preserving the Hebrew's construct-noun structure "blemish of them." The English translations provided (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) diverge further in how they connect lo' ("not") to "his children" versus "their blemish," reflecting the underlying ambiguity of the Hebrew word order itself.