Deuteronomy 33:25

Summary

This line from the Blessing of Moses on the tribe of Asher (or possibly continuing address to a tribal figure) is a two-part poetic saying. It states that "bolts" will be of iron and bronze, and that "strength" will match "days" — a verbless, parallel construction typical of Hebrew blessing formulas.

Key words

• barZel ("iron", H1270) — masculine singular noun, functioning as predicate with no explicit verb; the clause supplies "[will be]".
• min'aLeicha ("your bolts", H4515 + H9021) — masculine plural noun in construct form with 2ms suffix, literally "bolts-of-you."
• khe ("like", H9004) — comparative preposition introducing the second half of the parallel structure.
• yaMeicha ("your days", H3117G + H9021) — masculine plural construct noun with suffix, paired against dave'echa.
• dave'echa ("your strength", H1679 + H9021) — masculine singular construct noun with suffix; this term appears rarely in the corpus.

What the text says

The verse consists of two parallel nominal clauses, each lacking an explicit finite verb — a common feature of Hebrew poetic and blessing language, where "to be" is understood contextually. The first clause pairs barZel ("iron") and nechoShet ("bronze") as the material composition of min'aLeicha ("your bolts"), a construct-plural-plus-suffix form indicating something belonging to the addressee (masculine singular "you"). The second clause uses the comparative preposition khe ("like") to link yaMeicha ("your days") with dave'echa ("your strength"), producing a proportional statement: as one quantity is, so is the other.

Both halves rely on construct-suffix chains (min'aLeicha, yaMeicha, dave'echa), a grammatical pattern that ties the abstract nouns (bolts, days, strength) directly and inseparably to the second-person addressee. The absence of verbs gives the statement a timeless, aphoristic quality rather than a narrated event — it functions as a general declaration rather than a report of something happening at a specific moment.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew term min'aLeicha ("your bolts", H4515) is rendered in the LXX as τὸ ὑπόδημα ("the sandal/shoe") and in the Vulgate as "calceamentum" ("footwear"), both diverging from the Hebrew sense of door-bolts or locks toward an image of footwear. The Vulgate further restructures the second clause, translating "sicut dies juventutis tuae, ita et senectus tua" ("as the days of your youth, so also your old age"), introducing "youth" and "old age" where the Hebrew has simply "your days" and "your strength" (dave'echa, H1679). The LXX's ἰσχύς ("strength") matches the Hebrew dave'echa more closely than the Vulgate's rendering.