Leviticus 14:6

Summary

The verse describes the priest taking a live bird along with cedar wood, scarlet material, and hyssop, then dipping them — including the live bird — into the blood of a bird that was slaughtered over fresh water. The action forms part of a purification ritual sequence involving two birds.

Key words

• tzippor ("bird", H6833) — appears three times, twice modified by chaiyah ("living", H2416A) to specify the live bird, and once implied in contrast with the slaughtered one.
• yiqqach ("he will take", H3947G) — qal imperfect, indicating the priest's forthcoming or customary action; sets up the main verb of the sentence.
• taval ("he will dip", H2881) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative sequence begun by yiqqach; grammatically this construction chains the dipping action as the next step after taking.
• shechutah ("throat cut", H7819A) — qal passive participle, feminine singular, describing the second bird as one whose throat has been cut, contrasted with the "living" bird.
• chaiyim ("living", H2416A) — here modifying mayim ("water", H4325G) as masculine plural, describing the water as "living" (i.e., flowing/fresh water), distinct from its earlier feminine use describing the bird.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two main verbs joined by the narrative vav: yiqqach ("he will take") and taval ("he will dip"). The first verb governs a list of objects, each introduced by the direct object marker 'et: the living bird (tzippor ha-chaiyah), the cedar wood ('etz ha-'erez), the scarlet of the worm (sheni ha-tola'at), and the hyssop ('ezov). The construct phrases 'etz ("wood of") and sheni ("scarlet of") link these items to their descriptive nouns rather than standing as independent terms.

The second verb, taval, takes as its object the same materials (referenced by the suffix "them," 'otam) plus the living bird again, explicitly repeated with tzippor ha-chaiyah. This repetition in the Hebrew clarifies that the live bird itself, not only the wood, thread, and hyssop, is dipped into the blood. The location of that blood is specified through a construct chain: dam ha-tzippor ha-shechutah ("blood of the bird, the one slaughtered"), where the passive participle shechutah marks this second bird as already killed, distinguishing it grammatically and semantically from the chaiyah ("living") bird mentioned twice earlier. The final phrase, mayim ha-chaiyim ("living water"), uses the same root for "living" but in masculine plural agreement with mayim, describing the water rather than the bird — a repetition of the root that the Hebrew text uses for both animate and hydrological "life" without further distinction.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate condenses the passage, translating tzippor ha-chaiyah simply as "alium... vivum" ("another one, living") without repeating "bird" (passer) at its second occurrence, where the Hebrew explicitly repeats tzippor ha-chaiyah. The LXX (Swete) preserves both occurrences of "τὸ ὀρνίθιον τὸ ζῶν" ("the living bird"), matching the Hebrew's repetition. The Vulgate also renders mayim chaiyim implicitly through context rather than translating "living water" as a distinct phrase, differing from the Hebrew's explicit adjective-noun pairing.