Deuteronomy 7:10

Summary

Deuteronomy 7:10 describes Yehovah as one who repays those who hate him directly ("to his face") and does not delay in doing so — the punishment reaches the individual hater personally, without postponement.

Key words

• meshaLem ("[who] repays", H7999A) — piel participle, masculine singular, portraying repayment as a continuous or characteristic action of the subject, not a single event.
• sone'A ("[those who] hate", H8130) — qal participle, masculine plural construct, referring collectively to "his haters" as a group.
• panAv ("his face", H6440) — masculine plural construct noun with suffix, used idiomatically to mean "in his own presence" or "directly to him," appearing twice in the verse.
• leha'aviD ("by destroying", H0006) — hiphil infinitive, causative, expressing the result or manner of the repayment: it is carried out "by destroying" the hater.
• ye'aCher ("he delays", H0309) — piel imperfect, third person, negated by lo' ("not", H3808), stating that the action described will not be postponed.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chiastic repetition: the root shalem ("to repay", H7999A) appears twice, once as a participle (meshaLem) and once as an imperfect (yeshaLem), framing the whole statement about repayment to those who hate. Between these two occurrences, the text moves from a collective description — sone'A, plural, "those who hate him" — to a singular one, Sone', "the one who hates him." This shift from plural to singular within the same verse narrows the general statement about haters as a group into an application to each hater individually, reinforced by the phrase el-panAv ("to his face") occurring twice, once for each grammatical number.

The infinitive leha'aviD ("to destroy him", H0006) explains the mode of the repayment described by the initial participle, while the negated imperfect lo' ye'aCher ("he will not delay") introduces a temporal qualification: the action denoted by the second yeshaLem is not deferred. The construction places emphasis on directness (repayment "to the face") and immediacy (no delay), both expressed through verbal aspect rather than explicit adverbs.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew moves from plural (sone'A, "haters") to singular (Sone', "the one who hates") within the verse. Both the LXX (τοῖς μισοῦσιν, μισοῦσιν) and the Vulgate (odientibus) render this consistently in the plural throughout, without preserving the Hebrew's shift to a singular form for the second occurrence. The Vulgate also adds temporal adverbs not present in the Hebrew — statim ("immediately") and protinus ("forthwith") — to render the negated lo' ye'acher ("he will not delay"), making the sense of immediacy more explicit than the Hebrew imperfect construction alone conveys.