Exodus 22:2

Summary

This verse addresses the case of a thief caught in the act of breaking into a dwelling, who is then fatally struck. The Hebrew states that if this happens, the one who struck him incurs no bloodguilt, expressed idiomatically as "there is no blood(s) to him."

Key words

• mach.Teret ("breaking in", H4290) — feminine singular noun describing the act of forcible entry, with no explicit object such as "house" attached in the Hebrew.
• yi.ma.Tze' ("he will be found", H4672) — niphal (passive) imperfect, indicating the thief is discovered/caught in the act, not that he actively presents himself.
• hu.Kah ("he will be struck", H5221) — hophal (causative-passive) form, meaning the thief is the one being struck by another's action; the agent is left unspecified.
• da.Mim ("bloods", H1818) — masculine plural noun, an idiomatic plural used in Biblical Hebrew to denote bloodguilt or culpability for a killing, not literal multiple bloods.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle 'im ("if", H0518A), introducing a protasis built around the niphal verb yimmatze': the thief is "found" in the state of bamachteret ("in the breaking-in"), a construction that ties his discovery directly to the act itself rather than to any subsequent event. The definite article on ha.gannav ("the thief", H1590) marks him as the subject already introduced by the passive verb.

The apodosis is chained by two narrative-style vav-conjunctions attached to sequential perfect verbs: ve.hukkah ("and he will be struck") and va.met ("and he will die"). The hophal form of hukkah keeps the agent of the striking unnamed, focusing grammatically on the thief as the one acted upon, while va.met (qal, H4191) simply states the resulting death without further causal marking. The final clause, 'ein lo damim, uses the existential negative 'ein ("there is not", H0369) with the preposition-plus-suffix lo ("to him") and the plural noun damim, producing a formulaic legal expression rather than a literal statement about blood.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders damim with the singular noun φόνος ("murder"), collapsing the Hebrew idiomatic plural into a single abstract term. The Vulgate specifies "domum" ("house") as the object of the break-in ("effringens fur domum sive suffodiens"), a detail not explicitly present in the Hebrew mach.Teret, which names only the act of breaking-in without naming the structure entered.