Leviticus 10:18

Summary

The verse states that the blood of the offering was not brought into the sanctuary, and that the sons of Aaron were required to eat the meat within the holy place, in accordance with a prior command. The speaker frames this as a statement of fact followed by an instruction that apparently was not followed as expected.

Key words

• hen ("here!", H2005) — an interjection opening the sentence, drawing attention to the fact that follows; often functions like "behold" or "note that."
• huva ("it was brought", H0935P) — hophal (causative-passive) perfect: someone did not cause the blood to be brought in; the passive voice removes the actor from view.
• dammah ("its blood", H1818) — construct noun with the 3rd person feminine suffix "her/its," referring back to a feminine antecedent (the sin offering) not present in this verse itself.
• akhol tokhlu ("certainly eat" / "you will eat", H0398) — infinitive absolute followed by the qal imperfect of the same root; this doubling intensifies the verb, often rendered as strong obligation or certainty ("you must surely eat" / "you should have eaten").
• tzivveiti ("I commanded", H6680) — piel (intensive) perfect, first person: a completed act of commanding, referred to as the standard against which the action is measured.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the interjection hen ("here!"), immediately followed by a negated hophal perfect, lo-huva ("it was not brought"). The hophal stem marks the action as passive and causative — the blood was not made to enter the sanctuary — without naming who was responsible for bringing it or failing to do so. The phrase el-haqqodesh penimah ("into the holy place, within") specifies the location using a preposition plus the noun qodesh ("holy place", H6944G) reinforced by the adverb penimah ("within").

The second clause pivots to the infinitive absolute + imperfect construction akhol tokhlu — grammatically an intensified form of "eat" — describing what should happen with the meat instead. The object suffix on otah ("it/her") again points to a feminine referent, matching the suffix on dammah, indicating that both blood and meat belong to the same (feminine) sacrificial animal or offering category. The clause closes with ka'asher tzivveiti ("as I commanded"), a piel perfect that presents the standard already established in an earlier instruction, against which the current situation is being evaluated.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew opens with hen ("behold/here!"), an attention-drawing interjection, while the LXX uses the explanatory conjunction γάρ ("for"), integrating the clause as a reason rather than an exclamation. The Vulgate restructures the entire verse as a rhetorical question ("since... was not brought... you should have eaten... as commanded to me?"), using comedere debueritis ("you ought to have eaten") to render the intensified Hebrew akhol tokhlu, making explicit an obligation that the Hebrew grammar conveys only through the infinitive absolute's emphatic force. The BSB and SBLIBRE follow this interpretive path, using "should have eaten," while RV1909 preserves a more neutral "habíais de comerla" ("you were to eat it").