Leviticus 11:7

Summary

The verse identifies the pig (chazir, H2386) as an animal that meets one criterion of clean animals — a divided hoof — but fails the second, rumination, and is therefore declared unclean for the addressed group.

Key words

• chazir ("pig", H2386) — masculine singular noun, the subject animal under discussion, marked by the object marker 'et (H0853) and the definite article ha (H9009).
• mafris ("[is] dividing in two", H6536) — hiphil participle, describing an ongoing characteristic action (the causative form suggests the hoof "causes" a split) rather than a completed event.
• shosa' ("[is] cleaving", H8156) construct with sesa' ("a cleft of", H8157) — qal participle plus construct noun, together forming an idiom meaning literally "cleaving a cleft of a hoof," emphasizing the completeness of the division.
• gerah ("cud", H1625) — feminine singular noun, the object of rumination, placed before the negated verb for emphasis.
• yigar ("it ruminates", H1641) — qal imperfect, expressing an ongoing or habitual (non-)action: the animal does not, as a rule, chew the cud.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a conditional/descriptive clause introduced by ki ("that/if", H3588A), followed by two participial clauses that describe the pig's hoof, and then a third clause with a negated imperfect verb describing its non-rumination. The first participle, mafris (H6536), is in the causative (hiphil) stem, while the second, shosa' (H8156), is in the simple (qal) stem paired with a construct noun sesa' parsah ("a cleft of a hoof"), producing a doubled expression for the hoof's division — first stating that it divides, then specifying the manner of that division as a complete cleft. This redundancy in the Hebrew (two distinct verbal roots for "dividing") gives a fuller description of the hoof structure than a single verb would.

The pronoun hu' ("it", H1931) appears three times (positions 8, 14, 19), each time resuming the subject "the pig" before a predicate — a common construction in Hebrew descriptive/legal style that reinforces which subject is being characterized at each stage: first regarding the hoof, then regarding rumination, then regarding the final verdict "unclean" (tame', H2931). The clause gerah lo' yigar ("cud it does not ruminate") places the object gerah (H1625) before the verb yigar (H1641), which is a common word-order variation in Hebrew for emphasis on the cud itself as the missing element. The verdict tame' hu' lakhem ("unclean it [is] to you", combining H2931, H1931, H9005+H9036) closes the verse, addressed directly to a plural "you" (lakhem).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two Hebrew participles (mafris, H6536, and shosa', H8156) with two Greek verbs, διχηλεῖ ("divides in two") and ὀνυχίζει ("has claws/nails divided"), preserving the double description but with different verbal images (claws vs. cleft) than the Hebrew's hoof-cleft phrasing. The Vulgate compresses the Hebrew's two participial clauses about the hoof into a single subordinate clause ("qui cum ungulam dividat"), omitting the separate emphasis on the "cleft of a hoof" (sesa' parsah, H8157 + H6541) found in the Hebrew.