Bible Strands
Deuteronomy 32:25
Outside, the sword will take their children, and inside, terror will strike the young man and the young woman, the infant and the gray-haired man.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — Moses addresses Israel in a covenant song, warning that breaking the agreement will trigger comprehensive national ruin. The warning spans every demographic, from infants to the elderly, emphasizing total judgment.
The words — The Hebrew `te.sha.kel-` (it will make childless) and `'ei.Mah` (terror) frame the verse’s dual threat of generational extinction and psychological devastation. These terms specify that the coming calamity will systematically erase both the future and the present.
The thread — Ezekiel 7:15 repeats the structural contrast of external violence and internal affliction, while Leviticus 26:36 describes God sending a faintness into the hearts of survivors in foreign lands. Both passages extend the Deuteronomy pattern of covenant curses affecting both body and mind.
Why it lands — The text demands recognition that covenant failure leaves no demographic or location immune to judgment. It requires the reader to accept that divine discipline operates with deliberate, inescapable scope.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.
Cross-references
- Ezekiel 7:15 The sword is outside; plague and famine are within. Those in the country will die by the sword, and those in the city will be devoured by famine and plague.
- Lamentations 1:20 See, O LORD, how distressed I am! I am churning within; my heart is pounding within me, for I have been most rebellious. Outside, the sword bereaves; inside, there is death.
- Leviticus 26:36 As for those of you who survive, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies, so that even the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. And they will flee as one flees the sword, and fall when no one pursues them.
- 2 Chronicles 36:17 So He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who put their young men to the sword in the sanctuary, sparing neither young men nor young women, neither elderly nor infirm. God gave them all into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar,
- Isaiah 30:16 “No,” you say, “we will flee on horses.” Therefore you will flee! “We will ride swift horses,” but your pursuers will be faster.
- Jeremiah 9:21 For death has climbed in through our windows; it has entered our fortresses to cut off the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares.
- Lamentations 4:4 The nursing infant’s tongue clings in thirst to the roof of his mouth. Little children beg for bread, but no one gives them any.
- 2 Corinthians 7:5 For when we arrived in Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were pressed from every direction—conflicts on the outside, fears within.
- Lamentations 2:19 Arise, cry out in the night from the first watch of the night. Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to Him for the lives of your children who are fainting from hunger on the corner of every street.