Leviticus 10:7

Summary

Moses continues his instructions to Aaron and his surviving sons, forbidding them to leave the entrance of the Tent of Meeting under penalty of death, because the anointing oil of Yehovah is upon them. The verse closes with a narrative note: they acted according to Moses' word.

Key words

• tetze'u ("you must go out", H3318G) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, negated by lo ("not", H3808); expresses a prohibition addressed collectively to the priests.
• pen ("lest", H6435) — subordinating particle introducing a negative purpose/result clause, linking the prohibition to its consequence.
• tamutu ("you should die", H4191) — qal imperfect, 2mp, the consequence clause governed by pen.
• mishchat ("[the] anointing of", H4888A) — feminine singular construct noun, forming a double construct chain with shemen ("oil of", H8081) and Yehovah (H3068G): "the oil of the anointing of Yehovah".
• vaya'asu ("and they did", H6213A) — qal narrative (vav-consecutive) form, 3rd person masculine plural, marking the shift from direct speech to narrated action.

What the text says

The verse opens with a locative prepositional phrase, mi-Petach 'Ohel Mo'ed ("from the entrance of the Tent of Meeting", H6607/H0168G/H4150I), placed before the negated verb tetze'u, which fronts the spatial restriction as the topic of the prohibition. The construction lo tetze'u is a direct second-person imperfect prohibition, followed by pen tamutu — a clause that expresses not a simple future but a warned-against outcome ("lest you die"), a common Hebrew syntactic pattern linking command and danger.

The causal clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A) explains the prohibition: shemen mishchat Yehovah 'aleikhem ("the oil of the anointing of Yehovah is on you"). This is a construct chain of three nouns (shemen + mishchat + Yehovah), stacking genitive relationships without any verb "to be" — the copula is supplied by context, a normal feature of Hebrew nominal clauses.

The final clause, vaya'asu kidvar Mosheh ("and they did according to the word of Moses"), uses the narrative vav-consecutive form vaya'asu, shifting from reported speech back into the narrative flow of the text, and kidvar ("according to the word of", H1697G) marks conformity to Moses' instruction as a construct phrase.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders pen tamutu as ἵνα μὴ ἀποθάνητε ("so that you may not die"), a purpose clause, while the Hebrew pen more directly marks a warned consequence. The Vulgate uses alioquin peribitis ("otherwise you will perish"), a conditional-adversative construction differing from both. The Vulgate also adds sanctae ("holy") to "anointing," a qualifier not present in the Hebrew mishchat Yehovah or in the LXX's τῆς χρίσεως τὸ παρὰ κυρίου ("the anointing that is from the Lord").