Exodus 21:34

Summary

This verse establishes that the owner of a pit is liable for an animal that falls in and dies: he must pay compensation, restoring money to the animal's owner, while the dead animal becomes his own property. The verse uses two distinct verbs for the act of paying, both aimed at the same outcome.

Key words

• Ba'al ("owner of", H1167G) — construct singular noun, opening the sentence by identifying the liable party as "owner of [the pit]."
• yeshallem ("he will make compensation", H7999A) — piel (intensive stem) imperfect; the piel form frequently marks completed restitution or compensation as a legal obligation, not merely simple action.
• yashiv ("he will repay", H7725K) — hiphil (causative stem) imperfect; a second, distinct verb from yeshallem, causative in force ("cause [money] to return").
• ba'alayv ("its owners", H1167G) — masculine plural construct with 3rd person suffix; despite referring to a single animal's owner, the noun appears in plural form with the suffix, a grammatical feature not reflected in most translations, which render it as singular "its owner."
• ha-met ("the dead [animal]", H4191) — qal participle with definite article, literally "the one that has died," functioning as a substantized noun referring to the carcass.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built in three short clauses. The first, ba'al ha-bor yeshallem ("the owner of the pit shall make compensation"), states the general principle of liability using the piel verb yeshallem. The second clause, kesef yashiv liv'alav ("he shall return money to its owner(s)"), specifies the mechanism—payment in silver—using a different verb, yashiv (hiphil), literally "he shall cause to return." The repetition of the compensation idea through two separate verbal roots (shalem and shuv) is a feature of the Hebrew legal style, reinforcing the obligation without being redundant in meaning: one term frames the act as full restitution, the other as returning value to its rightful place.

The third clause, ve-ha-met yihyeh-lo ("and the dead [animal] will belong to him"), assigns the carcass to the pit owner as compensation for his payment, using the participle ha-met as a substantive.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew has two verbs (yeshallem, yashiv) for the compensation process; the LXX preserves this doubling with ἀποτίσει ("he shall pay in full") and δώσει ("he shall give"), matching the two-verb structure. The Vulgate, however, collapses both verbs into a single reddet ("he shall restore"), and adds pretium iumentorum ("the price of the animals"), a specification not present as a separate lexical item in the Hebrew text of this verse, though implied by context. The Hebrew plural form ba'alayv ("its owners") is rendered as singular ("su dueño," "its owner," "τῷ κυρίῳ") in all cited versions.