Leviticus 12:3

Summary

The verse specifies the timing of a ritual act: on the eighth day, "the flesh of his foreskin" is to undergo circumcision. The Hebrew verb is grammatically passive, without stating who performs the action.

Key words

• ba.Yom ("on the day", H3117G) — preposition + noun marking the temporal setting for the action.
• ha.she.mi.Ni ("the eighth", H8066) — ordinal number, masculine singular, specifying which day.
• yi.Mol ("it will be circumcised", H4135A) — niphal imperfect verb; the niphal stem marks passive or reflexive voice, so the subject (the flesh) undergoes the action rather than performing it. No human agent is named in the verb form itself.
• be.Sar ("flesh of", H1320) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linking directly to the following noun to form "flesh of X."
• a.re.la.T...o ("his foreskin", H6190H + H9023) — feminine singular noun in construct with a third-person masculine singular pronominal suffix, completing the construct chain "flesh of his foreskin."

What the text says

The Hebrew clause is built around a construct chain: besar ("flesh of") governs orlato ("his foreskin"), producing the compound subject "the flesh of his foreskin." This entire phrase functions as the grammatical subject of the verb yimol, which is in the niphal stem — a passive/reflexive conjugation. Because the verb is passive, the sentence structure places emphasis on what happens to the flesh, not on who performs the circumcision. The imperfect aspect of yimol conveys an action situated in future or ongoing time relative to the narrative, consistent with a legal or instructional statement about what is to occur on the specified day.

The temporal phrase u-vayom hashemini ("and on the eighth day") opens the sentence and is marked by the definite article on both yom ("day") and shemini ("eighth"), a common Hebrew pattern for ordinal expressions where the ordinal agrees in definiteness with the noun it modifies.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the verb with an active third-person form, περιτεμεῖ ("he will circumcise"), which introduces an implied unnamed agent, where the Hebrew yimol uses the passive/reflexive niphal without specifying an agent. The Vulgate's circumcidetur infantulus ("the little infant will be circumcised") retains passive voice matching the Hebrew niphal, but adds the noun infantulus ("little infant") as an explicit subject, whereas the Hebrew subject is grammatically "the flesh of his foreskin," not a term meaning "infant." The BSB and RV1909 preserve the "flesh of the foreskin" phrasing closer to the Hebrew, while SBLIBRE follows the Vulgate's pattern by substituting "el niño" ("the boy") for the anatomical construct phrase.