Leviticus 10:1

Summary

The verse narrates that Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, each took his own censer, put fire and incense in it, and presented before Yehovah a fire described as "strange" — one that had not been commanded by him. The action is told through a chain of four consecutive narrative verbs.

Key words

• va-yyiqchu ("and they took", H3947G) — qal narrative form; opens the sequence of actions, marking the first event in the chain.
• ish ("each", H0376I) — masculine singular noun used distributively, indicating that each of the two sons acted individually with his own censer (machtato, "his censer", H4289 + H9023).
• va-yyaqrivu ("and they presented", H7126H) — hiphil (causative) narrative form of the root for "to bring near"; the causative stem marks this as a formal act of offering, distinct from the simpler qal verbs used for taking, putting, and placing.
• zarah ("strange", H2114A) — qal participle, feminine singular, agreeing with esh ("fire", H0784); a participle functioning as an attributive adjective, describing the fire as belonging to a category outside what was prescribed.
• tzivvah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel perfect, describing a completed prior act of command against which the fire is measured; combined with the negation lo' ("not", H3808) and the relative asher ("which", H0834A), it forms the clause explaining why the fire is called "strange."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of four narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs: va-yyiqchu ("they took"), va-yyitnu ("they put", H5414H), va-yyasimu ("they placed", H7760H), and va-yyaqrivu ("they presented", H7126H). This chain presents the actions as a sequential, tightly linked series of events rather than isolated statements. The first three verbs are simple qal forms describing physical handling of censer, fire, and incense; the fourth verb shifts to the hiphil stem, marking the culminating act of formally bringing the fire "before the face of" (li-fnei, H6440G) Yehovah (H3068G).

The fire itself is qualified by the participle zarah ("strange", H2114A), which the following relative clause explains: asher lo' tzivvah otam ("which he had not commanded them"). The piel perfect tzivvah denotes a completed act of commanding that did not occur regarding this fire, and the direct object marker plus suffix otam ("them", H0853+H9038) specifies that the sons themselves were not the recipients of such a command concerning this particular fire.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ish machtato ("each his censer") as a shared item — "τὸ πυρεῖον αὐτοῦ" ("his censer," singular, without "each") — and specifies "οἱ δύο υἱοὶ" ("the two sons"), a numerical detail not explicit in the Hebrew bnei Aharon ("sons of Aaron"). The LXX also names the subject of the negated command explicitly as "Κύριος" ("the Lord"), where the Hebrew leaves the subject of tzivvah ("he commanded") implicit through the verb form alone. The Vulgate similarly renders the censers as plural ("thuribulis") tied jointly to both sons rather than distributively as "each his own," as the Hebrew ish ("each", H0376I) indicates.