Leviticus 14:26

Summary

The verse instructs that the priest is to pour some of the oil onto the palm of his own left hand. This action is part of the ritual sequence for the purification offering, immediately following the previous application of oil described earlier in the chapter.

Key words

• min ("some of", H4480A) — partitive preposition indicating that only a portion of the oil, not all of it, is poured.
• ha.Shemen ("the oil", H8081) — definite noun, the substance being handled, previously mentioned in the ritual.
• yiTzok ("he will pour", H3332G) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular; the imperfect aspect marks this as the next required action in the sequence, not a completed one.
• kaf ("[the] palm of", H3709G) — feminine singular noun in construct state, meaning it must be followed by another noun ("palm of ___") to be complete.
• ha.koHen ("the priest", H3548) — repeated twice in the verse, once as the subject of the pouring, once as the possessor of the palm.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with u-min-ha.Shemen ("and some of the oil"), placing the partitive phrase before the verb, which is a common Hebrew word order for marking the object that receives focus in a ritual instruction. The verb yiTzok ("he will pour") follows, with ha.koHen ("the priest") as its subject placed immediately after the verb — a standard verb-subject order in Biblical Hebrew narrative and legal instruction.

The phrase kaf ha.koHen ha.semaLit ("the palm of the priest, the left one") uses the construct chain kaf... ha.koHen ("palm of the priest") to specify whose palm receives the oil, and the adjective semaLit ("left", H8042G) agrees in gender (feminine) with kaf ("palm"), since kaf is grammatically feminine. This is a clarifying detail: the same person, the priest, both pours the oil and receives it in his own hand, and the text specifies laterality precisely by repeating ha.koHen rather than using a pronoun.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the second instance of "the priest" (in "palm of the priest") with the reflexive possessive suam ("his own"), producing "in manum suam sinistram" ("into his own left hand"), rather than repeating the noun "priest" as the Hebrew ha.koHen does. The LXX (Septuagint), by contrast, follows the Hebrew structure more closely, repeating tou hiereos ("of the priest") to mirror the double occurrence of koHen in the Hebrew text.