Deuteronomy 5:25

Summary

This verse records the people's rhetorical question about the danger of dying if they continue to hear the voice of Yehovah directly, fearing that the great fire (associated with the divine presence) will consume them. The clause structure moves from an immediate fear ("why should we die") to a conditional cause (repeated hearing) to a concluding certainty ("and we will die").

Key words

• 'a.Tah ("therefore", H6258) — adverb marking the logical transition from the preceding narrative to the people's present concern.
• na.Mut ("will we die", H4191) — qal imperfect, first person plural, expressing a future/potential action, here used in a rhetorical question introduced by lamah ("why").
• to.khe.Le.nu ("it will consume", H0398) with suffix nu ("us", H9035) — qal imperfect, third feminine singular (referring to ha'Esh, "the fire"), directly acting on the pronominal object "us."
• yo.se.Fim ("[are] repeating", H3254G) — qal participle, masculine plural, describing an ongoing or habitual action ("continuing to..."), paired with the infinitive shmoa' ("to hear", H8085G) to form the idea "if we continue hearing."
• va.Ma.te.nu ("and we will die", H4191) — same root as na.Mut, but here in sequential (vav-consecutive) perfect form, marking the final consequence in the chain of clauses rather than a question.

What the text says

The verse is built on two parallel death-clauses using the same root mut ("to die", H4191): first as an imperfect in the rhetorical question lamah namut ("why will we die"), and second as a sequential perfect va-matnu ("and we will die"), which grammatically closes the conditional chain begun by 'im ("if", H0518A). Between these two occurrences, the causal clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A) explains the immediate danger: to'khelenu ha'esh hagedolah hazot ("this great fire will consume us"), with the verb agreeing in feminine gender with 'esh ("fire", H0784).

The conditional clause introduced by 'im uses a participle-plus-infinitive construction, yosefim ... lishmoa' ("continuing to hear"), which in Biblical Hebrew expresses an ongoing or repeated action rather than a single event — the concern is about continued exposure to qol Yehovah Eloheinu ("the voice of Yehovah our God"), a construct chain marking whose voice is in question. The word od ("again/still", H5750) reinforces this sense of continuation. The syntactic movement — question, causal explanation, conditional restatement, consequential perfect — creates a chain in which the initial fear (dying now) is answered by a hypothetical repetition of the same fear (dying if hearing continues), formally closed by the same verb root that opened the verse.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders namut as a subjunctive-like construction (μὴ ἀποθάνωμεν, "let us not die"), shifting the Hebrew rhetorical question into a negative purpose/fear clause. The Vulgate keeps the interrogative form (Cur ergo moriemur, "why then shall we die"), closer to the Hebrew structure. The BSB and SBLIBRE render the final va.Ma.te.nu as a separate future statement ("we will die"), while the Hebrew marks it as a sequential perfect tied grammatically to the preceding conditional clause, a nuance not distinguishable in translation.