Leviticus 11:10

Summary

Leviticus 11:10 states that any aquatic creature lacking senappir ("fin", H5579) and qasqeset ("scale", H7193) — whether among the swarming creatures of the waters or the living beings dwelling in the waters — is sheqets ("detestable thing", H8263) for the addressees. The verse closes the criterion begun in verse 9, defining by exclusion what is not permitted.

Key words

• khol ("all", H3605) — appears three times as a construct noun ("all of…"), each time governing a following phrase and creating a chain of scope: "all that…," "every swarming thing of…," "every creature of…"
• 'ein ("not", H0369) — a construct existential negator combined with the preposition le ("to") and a pronominal suffix, producing the idiom "there is not to it," the standard Hebrew way of expressing lack of possession (here, lack of fin and scale).
• sheretz ("swarming thing of", H8318) — a masculine singular noun in construct state, meaning it cannot stand alone but must be bound to the following noun ha-mayim ("the waters", H4325G), yielding "swarming-thing-of-the-waters."
• nefesh ha-chayyah ("living creature", H5315K + H2416A) — a feminine noun modified by a feminine adjective, marking a second, broader category of aquatic life distinct from sheretz.
• hem ("they", H1992) — an independent personal pronoun that, in a verbless clause, functions as a copula linking the predicate sheqets to the initial subject khol.

What the text says

The verse opens with ve-khol 'asher 'ein-lo ("and all that has no…"), a relative clause built on an existential negative construction rather than a finite verb: literally "and all that — there is not to it fin and scale." This is the ordinary Hebrew mechanism for expressing absence of an attribute, without any verb "to have." The clause then specifies two locative domains, ba-yammim ("in the seas") and ba-nechalim ("in the wadis", H5158A), before narrowing the scope through two parallel prepositional phrases introduced by mi-kol ("from every…"): first sheretz ha-mayim ("swarming thing of the waters"), then nefesh ha-chayyah 'asher ba-mayim ("living creature that is in the waters"). These two construct/relative phrases distinguish two categories of aquatic life under a single exclusionary rule.

The sentence ends with a verbless nominal clause, sheqets hem lakhem ("detestable-thing they to-you"), where the predicate noun sheqets precedes the subject pronoun hem, which resumes the initial khol. There is no explicit verb "to be"; the predication is carried entirely by word order and the resumptive pronoun.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders sheretz ha-mayim as ὅσα ἐρεύγεται τὰ ὕδατα ("as many as the waters spew forth"), a periphrastic rendering rather than a literal "swarming thing" equivalent. The Vulgate compresses the Hebrew's two distinct categories (sheretz and nefesh ha-chayyah) into a single relative clause, "eorum quæ in aquis moventur et vivunt" ("of those that move and live in the waters"), without preserving the construct-chain distinction visible in the Hebrew between "swarming things of the waters" and "living creatures in the waters."