Leviticus 10:4

Summary

Moses calls Mishael and Elzaphan, sons of Aaron's uncle Uzziel, and commands them to remove their relatives from in front of the sanctuary to outside the camp. The verse narrates Moses's summons and his direct instruction using two imperative verbs.

Key words

• va-yikra ("and he summoned", H7121G) — qal narrative form, marking the next event in the story sequence ("and then he called").
• dod ("uncle of", H1730I) — masculine singular construct noun, linking Uzziel to Aaron as his paternal uncle.
• kirvu ("draw near", H7126G) — qal imperative plural, a direct command addressed to both Mishael and Elzaphan.
• se'u ("carry", H5375H) — qal imperative plural, paired with the previous imperative to form a two-part instruction.
• achekhem ("your relatives", H0251G + H9026) — construct noun with second-person plural suffix; the direct object of the carrying, marked by 'et (H0853).

What the text says

The verse divides into two narrative actions joined by the narrative vav (H9001): Moses "summons" (yikra, H7121G) two named individuals, and then "says" (yomer, H0559) to them. The genealogical chain — bene ("sons of", H1121A) Uzziel, dod ("uncle of", H1730I) Aaron — identifies Mishael and Elzaphan through two layers of kinship construct nouns, situating them as Aaron's cousins rather than his sons.

The instruction itself uses two consecutive qal imperatives, kirvu ("draw near", H7126G) and se'u ("carry", H5375H), without a connecting conjunction between them, giving the command a terse, rapid quality in Hebrew that may be smoothed into a single flowing sentence in translation. The object of the carrying is achekhem ("your relatives", H0251G), a term whose base meaning is "brothers" but which functions here as a broader kinship term for relatives; the Hebrew does not specify "bodies" as an object — this is implied by context rather than stated by a specific noun for corpse. The destination phrase moves through two prepositional stages: me'et pnei ha-qodesh ("from the face of the holy place", H0854 + H6440G + H6944G) and el michutz la-machaneh ("to outside the camp", H2351 + H4264), tracing the removal spatially from the sanctuary precinct to beyond the camp boundary.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders dod ("uncle of", H1730I) as "τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ πατρὸς" ("of the brother of the father"), an expanded paraphrase of the same kinship relation rather than a single-word equivalent. The BSB translation adds "the bodies" and describes Mishael and Elzaphan's relatives as "cousins," specifying details not lexically present in the Hebrew achekhem ("your relatives", H0251G), which itself does not specify degree of kinship or mention corpses directly.