Leviticus 14:30

Summary

The verse instructs that one of two possible bird offerings — turtledoves or young pigeons — is to be presented, with the specific quantity or type left dependent on what the offerer's financial means allow. The clause closes a ritual sequence (marked by a narrative vav) describing the purification offering for a person recovering from a skin condition.

Key words

• 'a.Sah ("he will offer", H6213I) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain from the preceding verses; the grammatical subject ("he") is not explicit in this word alone.
• 'e.Chad ("one", H0259) — feminine singular cardinal number, referring back to the birds category, indicating a single bird is selected from the pair of options.
• to.Rim ("turtle-doves", H8449) / yo.Nah ("dove", H3123) — the two bird species named as alternatives, joined by 'o ("or", H0176A).
• ta.Sig ("it will reach", H5381) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, third-person feminine, part of the idiom describing what a person's means can attain.
• ya.D-o ("his hand", H3027I + H9023) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, forming with tassig the idiomatic phrase "what his hand reaches," denoting financial capacity.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure places the verb 'a.Sah first (verb-initial, typical of Biblical Hebrew narrative sequence), followed by the object marked with 'et, then the specification of which bird is being offered. The phrase ha-'echad min ha-torim 'o min bene ha-yonah ("the one from the turtledoves or from the young of the dove") sets up a either/or construction using two parallel min ("of") prepositional phrases, showing that the offerer selects one bird from either of two acceptable categories.

The final clause, me'asher tassig yado ("from that which his hand reaches"), is an idiomatic construction: the hiphil imperfect tassig ("it will reach/attain") governed by yad ("hand") as its grammatical subject, expresses the notion of what a person's resources allow. This idiom cannot be rendered word-for-word without losing its idiomatic sense of "as much as he can afford" or "as much as is within his means."

Differences between versions

The Vulgate ("et turturem sive pullum columbae offeret") omits any equivalent of the Hebrew idiom me'asher tassig yado concerning financial means, simply stating that the turtledove or young pigeon will be offered, without qualifying it by the offerer's capacity to pay. The LXX preserves the idiom with καθότι εὗρεν αὐτοῦ ἡ χείρ ("according to what his hand found"), using aorist tense rather than the Hebrew imperfect. The SBLIBRE translation explicitly names "el sacerdote" ("the priest") as the subject of the offering verb, an identification not present in the Hebrew wording of this verse itself, where the subject of 'a.Sah is grammatically unspecified beyond "he."