Leviticus 11:43

Summary

Leviticus 11:43 forbids the Israelites from making themselves detestable or unclean through contact with swarming creatures. The verse builds its prohibition through three related but grammatically distinct verbs of defilement, applied to "your selves" (the whole person, not just the body).

Key words

• teshaketzu ("you make detestable", H8262) — piel jussive, 2nd person plural; the piel stem intensifies the root shqts, and the jussive mood expresses prohibition ("do not let yourselves...").
• nafshoteikhem ("your selves", H5315I) — plural construct of nefesh with pronominal suffix; refers to the whole living person, not merely the physical body.
• sheretz hashoretz ("the swarming thing that swarms", H8318/H8317) — noun + participle from the same root (shrts), an emphatic construction pairing the thing with the action that defines it.
• titame'u ("you make yourselves unclean", H2930A) — hithpael imperfect, reflexive stem, describing an ongoing or repeated self-caused state.
• nitmetem ("you will be/become unclean", H2930A) — niphal sequential perfect, passive/reflexive stem, marking the resulting state after the hithpael action.

What the text says

The verse is built on three clauses, each governed by a different verbal stem of impurity, moving from an intensive prohibition (teshaketzu, piel) to a reflexive process (titame'u, hithpael) to a resulting state (nitmetem, niphal). This stem progression is not visible in translation, since English and Spanish render all three with variants of "unclean" or "defiled." The doubled root in sheretz hashoretz — "the swarming thing that swarms" — is a construction that reinforces the identity of the creature with its characteristic action, a nuance lost when translated simply as "crawling creature" or "reptil que anda arrastrando." The object of defilement is nafshoteikhem, "your selves," using nefesh rather than a word for body, indicating the totality of the person as what is affected.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders all three Hebrew verb forms with negated subjunctive/future constructions (μὴ βδελύξητε, οὐ μιανθήσεσθε, οὐκ ἀκάθαρτοι ἔσεσθε), flattening the Hebrew's stem distinctions (piel/hithpael/niphal) into a uniform negative structure. The LXX also adds "ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς" ("on the earth"), a phrase absent from the Hebrew. The Vulgate is considerably shorter, introducing "tangatis" ("you touch"), a verb of physical contact not present in the Hebrew of this verse, and condensing the three Hebrew clauses into a different threefold Latin structure.