Leviticus 14:45

Summary

The verse instructs that the contaminated house be physically dismantled: its stones, its wood, and all the dust/plaster of the house must be removed and taken outside the city to an unclean place. The action follows directly from the priest's declaration in the preceding verses regarding a house afflicted with a persistent plague.

Key words

• natzatz ("he will pull down", H5422) — qal sequential perfect, third person singular, continuing the narrative chain of actions begun earlier in the chapter.
• avanav ("its stones", H0068G) — feminine plural noun in construct form with a third-person masculine singular suffix ("its"), referring back to bayit ("house", H1004B).
• etsav ("its wood", H6086G) — masculine plural construct noun with the same possessive suffix, paralleling avanav in structure.
• afar ("dust of", H6083) — masculine singular construct noun, governed by kol ("all", H3605), forming the phrase "all the dust of the house."
• hotzi ("he will take out", H3318H) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, third person singular, denoting the act of causing the removed materials to go outside.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built entirely on a chain of sequential perfect verbs — natzatz ("he will pull down") and hotzi ("he will take out") — both third person singular, continuing a narrative sequence that assumes a single subject already established earlier in the passage (the priest). The direct objects are marked explicitly with 'et four times, listing what must be removed: "the house," "its stones," "its wood," and "all the dust of the house." The threefold repetition of 'et before each material (stones, wood, dust) gives the list a formal, itemized structure, distinguishing the components of the house rather than treating it as a single mass. The final destination is expressed through a double preposition phrase, 'el-michutz la'ir ("to outside of the city") and 'el-maqom tame' ("to an unclean place"), both introduced by 'el ("to"), marking two aspects of the same removal: spatial exclusion from the city and classification of the destination as tame' ("unclean", H2931).

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verbs are grammatically singular (natzatz, hotzi — "he will pull down," "he will take out"), implying a single actor continuing from the preceding verses. The LXX renders these as plural, καθελοῦσιν ("they will tear down") and ἐξοίσουσιν ("they will bring out"), and the Vulgate similarly uses the plural destruent ("they will destroy"). The LXX also lists the materials in a different order, wood (τὰ ξύλα) before stones (τοὺς λίθους), reversing the Hebrew sequence of stones then wood. The Hebrew afar ("dust") is rendered literally as χοῦν ("soil/dust") in the LXX and pulverem ("dust") in the Vulgate, while some modern translations render it as "plaster" or "mezcla" ("mortar/mixture"), interpreting the substance functionally rather than translating the word literally.