Leviticus 14:46

Summary

The verse states that anyone who enters the house during the entire period that it was shut up will be unclean until evening. It continues the regulations concerning a house affected by a spreading condition, specifying the ritual consequence for entering it during its closure.

Key words

• Ba' ("[one who] goes/comes", H0935G) — qal participle, functioning as a substantive: "the one entering," setting up the subject of the sentence.
• Bayit ("house", H1004B) — masculine singular noun, the object of entry, referring back to the house under discussion in the chapter.
• yemei ("days of", H3117G) — construct plural of "days," linking to hisGir to express a bounded time period ("all the days that...").
• hisGir ("he has shut up", H5462) — hiphil (causative) perfect, third person masculine singular: a completed action performed by an unstated but implied agent (grammatically "he caused to be shut/confined").
• yitMa' ("he will be unclean", H2930A) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular: expresses the resulting state as an ongoing or future consequence for the one entering.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with the article plus participle ha-Ba' ("the one entering"), a construction that functions like a relative clause ("whoever enters"), naming the subject before the rest of the sentence supplies the condition and consequence. The phrase kol-yemei hisGir 'oto ("all the days [that] he shut it up") uses the construct chain kol-yemei ("all the days of") followed by the finite verb hisGir, a hiphil perfect. The hiphil stem is causative, so the verb literally means "he caused [it] to be closed/confined," with the direct object marker 'et plus suffix -o ("it") referring back to ha-Bayit ("the house"). The subject of hisGir is not stated in this verse itself — it is a third-person masculine singular verb, and grammatically the closing was performed by someone (contextually, the priest), though the clause here simply reports the action as completed, not by whom.

The final clause, yitMa' 'ad-ha-'Arev, uses a qal imperfect verb, yitMa' ("he will be unclean"), indicating a resulting condition that begins upon entry and continues 'ad-ha-'Arev ("until the evening"), evening marking the boundary of the unclean status.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the clause with a passive participle, ἀφωρισμένη ἐστὶν ("it is separated/set apart"), describing the house's state without an explicit agent, whereas the Hebrew hisGir is an active causative verb ("he shut it up") implying a specific actor. The Vulgate similarly uses a passive construction, quando clausa est ("when it is closed"), matching the LXX's impersonal framing rather than preserving the Hebrew's active causative form.