Exodus 29:34

Summary

The verse gives an instruction for disposing of any meat from the ordination offerings or bread that remains until morning: it must be burned rather than eaten, because it is designated as holy. The clause structure moves from a conditional protasis (what happens if leftovers occur) to a command (burn it) to a prohibition with its rationale (it is holy).

Key words

• yivvater ("it will be left over", H3498) — niphal imperfect, passive in sense ("be left"), opening the conditional clause with 'im ("if", H0518A).
• millu'im ("installation offerings", H4394) — masculine plural noun in construct with besar ("meat of", H1320), naming the specific sacrificial category whose remains are addressed.
• sarafta ("you will burn", H8313) — qal sequential perfect continuing the narrative/legal chain after the conditional, functioning as a command directed to "you" (masculine singular).
• notar ("what is left over", H3498) — niphal participle from the same root as yivvater, now used as a substantive ("the remainder") marked by the object marker 'et (H0853) and the definite article.
• qodesh ("a holy thing", H6944G) — masculine singular noun serving as predicate in the closing causal clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A), with hu' ("it", H1931) as the subject pronoun.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a legal conditional: ve'im yivvater ("and if it is left over") sets the hypothetical, followed by the source of the leftover material — mibbesar hammillu'im ("from the meat of the installation offerings") and umin hallechem ("and from the bread") — bounded temporally by 'ad haboqer ("until the morning"). The apodosis shifts to a direct instruction using the sequential perfect ve+sarafta ("and you shall burn"), a common Hebrew construction for commands following conditional clauses. The object of burning is hannotar, the same root (H3498) as the earlier verb yivvater, now nominalized as a participle with the definite article — a grammatical echo linking "what remains" back to the initial condition.

The final two clauses form a prohibition with justification: lo ye'akhel ("it will not be eaten") uses a niphal imperfect, passive in force, stating a general rule rather than addressing a specific agent. The reason follows with ki qodesh hu' ("for it is a holy thing"), a simple nominal clause with the pronoun hu' functioning as copula-subject, asserting the sacred status of the item as the grounds for the prohibition.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders millu'im ("installation offerings", H4394) as "τῆς θυσίας τῆς τελειώσεως" ("the sacrifice of consecration/completion"), an interpretive expansion not present as a separate word in the Hebrew, which simply has the construct noun millu'im. The Vulgate's carnibus consecratis ("consecrated meats") similarly interprets millu'im through the concept of consecration rather than transliterating or directly matching the Hebrew term. For qodesh ("a holy thing", H6944G), the LXX uses hagiasma ("a sanctified thing"), a closely corresponding noun, while the Vulgate uses the verbal phrase sanctificata sunt ("they have been sanctified"), shifting from a nominal predication in the Hebrew to a passive verbal construction.