Deuteronomy 18

## Summary Deuteronomy 18 has two main parts: the first (vv. 1-8) sets out that the Levitical priests receive no land inheritance but live from offerings given to Yahweh, and the second (vv. 9-22) forbids Canaanite divinatory practices and promises that Yahweh will raise up a prophet "like Moses" whose words must be tested against whether they come true. ## Key words - *nachalah* ("inheritance", H5159) — repeated in vv. 1-2 as a feminine singular noun; the text states the Levites have no *nachalah* "with Israel" but that Yahweh himself is called their *nachalah*, an unusual metaphorical use of an ordinarily concrete term (land-portion). - *navi'* ("prophet", H5030) — masculine singular noun used three times (vv. 15, 18, 20-22) without the article in vv. 15/18, denoting the office generically ("a prophet") rather than one specific individual in the grammar itself. - *yaziyd* ("he will act presumptuously", H2102) — hiphil imperfect from a root meaning "to boil/be presumptuous"; in v. 20 it marks the causative, willful nature of the prophet's wrongdoing, contrasted with the involuntary case in v. 22 (*zadon*, "presumption"). - *qosem qesamim* ("diviner of divinations", H7080/H7081) — v. 10 uses a qal participle plus its cognate plural noun as direct object (a "cognate accusative" construction), intensifying the description of the practice by repeating the root. - *dibber* ("he has spoken", H1696) — piel perfect, repeated in vv. 21-22 with the negation *lo'* ("not," H3808) to frame the criterion for testing a prophetic word: whether Yahweh *dibber* ("spoke") it. ## What the text says The chapter opens with a negated verb clause: *lo' yihyeh* ("it will not belong," H3808 + H1961) governs the priests' lack of *chelek ve-nachalah* ("portion and inheritance," H2506/H5159) "with Israel" (*'im Yisra'el*, H5973A/H3478). Instead, v. 1 specifies they eat *'ishei Yahweh* ("the fire offerings of Yahweh," H0801/H3068G) — a construct chain marking the sacrificial gifts as the source of their sustenance. Verse 2 restates the negation and then supplies a nominal clause, *Yahweh hu' nachalato* ("Yahweh, he [is] his inheritance"), where the independent pronoun *hu'* (H1931) emphasizes identity rather than possession of land — the deity substitutes for territorial inheritance grammatically and thematically. The prophetic section (vv. 15-22) uses parallel imperfect verbs of raising up: *yaqim* (v. 15, H6965I) and *aqim* (v. 18, same root, first person) — Yahweh as subject in the third case, self-referential in the first — describing the same act. The distinction between the prophet who speaks presumptuously *asher lo' tzivitiv* ("whom I did not command," v. 20) and one whose word simply fails to occur (*lo' yihyeh ha-davar ve-lo' yavo'*, "the thing will not be, and it will not come," v. 22) rests on repeated use of the negation *lo'* attached to different verbs (*tzivah* "to command," H6680; *hayah* "to be," H1961; *bo'* "to come," H0935G), each negation targeting a distinct verifiable criterion — divine commissioning versus outcome. ## Differences between versions In v. 8, the Hebrew phrase *levad mimkarav 'al ha-avot* ("besides his sales, according to the fathers") is rendered by the LXX as πλὴν τῆς πράσεως τῆς κατὰ πατριάν ("except the sale according to the patrimony") and by the Vulgate as "excepto eo, quod in urbe sua ex paterna ei successione debetur" ("except what is owed to him in his city from paternal succession") — both add interpretive expansions not explicit in the terse Hebrew construct chain. The Hebrew text of v. 20 ends the verse with *va-met ha-navi ha-hu* ("and that prophet will die"), but the Swete LXX text provided jumps directly from v. 18 into an expanded paraphrase covering vv. 19-22 material within its rendering of v. 19, showing a different verse-division/consolidation in the Greek witness compared to the Masoretic verse numbering.