Leviticus 1:3

Summary

The verse states the condition for a burnt offering ('olah) taken from the herd: it must be a male without blemish, and the offerer is to bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting so that it may be accepted before Yehovah.

Key words

• 'im ("if", H0518A): conditional particle opening the casuistic (case-law) structure typical of Leviticus sacrificial instructions.
• 'olah ("burnt offering", H5930A): names the offering type under discussion; the noun stands in apposition to qorban.
• qorban ("present", H7133A): construct noun ("offering of...") taking a possessive suffix, literally "his brought-near-thing," from the same root as the verb yakriv.
• tamim ("unblemished", H8549G): adjective specifying the physical condition required of the male animal (zakhar, H2145).
• yakriv ("he will present", H7126H): hiphil (causative) imperfect, appearing twice in the verse with different direct objects marked.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a conditional clause: 'im ("if") sets up the case, followed by the predicate nominal 'olah qorbano — literally "a burnt offering [is] his offering" — before the source of the animal is specified with min-ha-baqar ("from the herd"). The required qualities, zakhar ("male") and tamim ("unblemished"), are stacked as adjectives without a copula, a common feature of Hebrew descriptive lists.

Notably, the causative verb yakriv (H7126H, hiphil imperfect of the root that also produces the noun qorban) occurs twice: once with a pronominal suffix (yakrivennu, "he will present it") governing the qualification of the animal, and again with the separate object marker 'oto (H0853) plus suffix (yakriv 'oto, "he will present it") governing the location and purpose clause. This repetition ties the qualification of the animal (male, unblemished) to one instance of the verb, and the act of bringing it to the tent of meeting to the second instance — a structure that some translations collapse into a single English verb "present" or "offer," obscuring the doubled root in the Hebrew.

The final phrase uses the construct chain lirtzono lifney Yehovah — "for its ratson ('acceptance/favor', H7522)... before the face of (lifney, H6440G) Yehovah" — placing the purpose of the offering (acceptance) in relation to Yehovah's presence, expressed idiomatically as being "before his face."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two occurrences of yakriv with two different Greek verbs, προσάξει and προσοίσει, where the Hebrew repeats the same root H7126H both times. The Vulgate translates lirtzono ("for its acceptance," H7522) as "ad placandum sibi Dominum" ("to appease the Lord for himself"), introducing propitiatory language that is not explicit in the Hebrew noun ratson, which denotes acceptance or favor rather than appeasement.