Leviticus 11:38

Summary

The verse addresses a conditional case: if water has been placed on seed and a carcass (of an unclean creature, per the preceding context) falls upon it, the seed becomes unclean. The ruling depends specifically on the presence of water as a moistening agent prior to contact with the dead body.

Key words

• yuttan ("it will be put", H5414H) — hophal imperfect, a causative-passive form: the water is caused to be placed, not stated who places it; the imperfect aspect marks this as a hypothetical/future case within the conditional clause.
• zera' ("seed", H2233G) — masculine singular noun, the object onto which water falls and which later receives the carcass; grammatically the fixed point of reference for both actions.
• nafal ("it will fall", H5307G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the conditional sequence begun by yuttan; qal (simple active) contrasts with the passive yuttan, indicating the carcass's fall is a direct, unmediated action.
• nivlatam ("their carcass", H5038) — feminine singular noun in construct with the third person plural suffix ("their"), referring back to carcasses named in surrounding verses; construct form ties it grammatically to an implied noun phrase ("from the carcass of them").
• tame' ("unclean", H2931) — masculine singular adjective, the predicate stating the resulting status of the seed, placed emphatically before the pronoun hu' ("it", H1931).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a two-part conditional chain: ve-khi ("and if", H9002+H3588A) introduces the protasis, which itself contains two sequential verbal actions — yuttan (water "is put," hophal, passive) followed by nafal (carcass "falls," qal, active), joined by the narrative vav (H9001) that chains the events in sequence. This structure marks a temporal and causal order: water first, then carcass-fall, is the specific condition triggering uncleanness. The apodosis, tame' hu' lakhem ("unclean it [is] to you"), uses the adjective tame' placed before the pronoun hu', a common predicate-first construction in Hebrew stative clauses, followed by lakhem ("to you," H9005+H9036) marking the community for whom this ruling applies (literally "to you," second person masculine plural).

The passive form yuttan leaves the agent of the water's placement unspecified — the text does not say who or what puts the water there, only that its presence is the precondition. The switch to active qal in nafal shifts responsibility (grammatically) to the carcass's action of falling, rather than describing an action performed on the seed.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders nivlatam ("their carcass," H5038, singular noun with plural suffix) as τῶν θνησιμαίων αὐτῶν ("of their dead bodies," plural), reflecting a plural understanding of the carcasses. The Vulgate similarly uses "morticinis" (plural, "with dead bodies") where the Hebrew grammatical head noun nivlat is singular in form despite the plural suffix. The Hebrew tame' hu' lakhem ("unclean it [is] to you") is rendered in the Vulgate as "polluetur" ("it will be defiled"), shifting the stative adjectival predicate into an active future passive verb.