Leviticus 14:42

Summary

Leviticus 14:42 gives instructions for repairing a house after contaminated stones and plaster have been removed: new stones are to replace the old ones, and fresh dust/mortar is to be used to replaster the house. The verse continues a chain of ritual actions using sequential verb forms.

Key words

• avanim ("stones", H0068G) — masculine-form noun that is grammatically feminine; it takes the feminine plural adjective acherot.
• acherot ("other", H0312) — feminine plural adjective agreeing with avanim, marking the replacement stones as distinct from those removed.
• tachat ("in place of", H8478H) — masculine singular noun in construct state, literally "the underneath/place of," functioning here as "instead of."
• aphar ("dust", H6083) — masculine singular noun, the material used for replastering; paired with acher ("other", H0312) in masculine singular agreement.
• tach ("he will plaster", H2902A) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the chain of ritual actions begun with ve-lakechu ("and they will take").

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ve-lakechu, ve-hevi'u, tach) linked by the narrative vav (H9001), a construction typical of legal/procedural Hebrew describing a fixed sequence of required actions: taking stones, bringing them, and plastering. Between these, yiqqach ("he will take", H3947G) appears as an imperfect rather than a sequential perfect, marking a slight shift in the chain — the subject narrows from a plural "they" (who supply stones) to a singular "he" (who takes the dust and plasters), suggesting a division of labor within the same procedure.

The phrase el-tachat ha-avanim ("to instead-of the stones") uses tachat in construct form, literally "to the place of the stones," rendered idiomatically as "in place of." The adjective acherot agrees in gender and number with avanim, while acher agrees with the singular masculine aphar, showing how Hebrew adjectival agreement changes according to the noun's grammatical class rather than any inherent gender of the substance.

Differences between versions

The LXX expands the description of the stones with ἀπεξυσμένους στερεοὺς ("scraped, solid"), qualifiers not present in the Hebrew, which simply says avanim acherot ("other stones"). The Vulgate adds an explanatory clause, pro his qui ablati fuerint ("in place of those which had been removed"), making explicit what the Hebrew leaves implicit in tachat ha-avanim. For aphar ("dust"), the LXX uses χοῦν ("soil/dust"), close to the Hebrew, while the Vulgate renders it luto ("mud/mortar"), a slightly different material image than "dust."