Leviticus 14:7

Summary

The verse describes the priest's ritual action of sprinkling blood seven times on the person being purified from a skin disease, declaring that person pure, and then releasing a live bird into the open field.

Key words

• hiZah ("he will spatter [it]", H5137A) — hiphil sequential perfect: a causative verbal form indicating the subject (the priest) causes the sprinkling to happen; continues the narrative sequence of ritual actions.
• mitahHer ("[one] purifying himself", H2891) — hithpael participle: the reflexive/passive stem describes the person as one undergoing the process of purification, not merely a passive recipient.
• tzaRa'at ("serious skin disease", H6883) — feminine singular noun naming the condition from which the person is being purified.
• tiHar ("he will declare pure", H2891) — piel sequential perfect: the same root as mitahHer but in the intensive/factitive stem, meaning the priest performs the declarative act of pronouncing purity, distinct grammatically from the person's own reflexive state.
• shiLach ("he will let go", H7971H) — piel sequential perfect: an intensive verbal form describing the deliberate release of the bird.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (hizzah, tihar, shillach), each introduced by the narrative ve ("and", H9001). This construction presents three consecutive priestly actions as a single continuous ritual sequence: sprinkling, declaring pure, releasing. All three verbs share an unstated third-person masculine singular subject, understood from context as the priest, since the passage does not name him explicitly here.

Grammatically, the text uses two different stems of the same root H2891: the person is mitahHer, in the hithpael (reflexive/middle) participle, marking him as one in the process of self-purification, while the priest's action is tihar, in the piel (intensive/factitive), meaning to render or declare pure. Hebrew grammar therefore distinguishes the person's ongoing state from the priest's authoritative act, a nuance that translations rendering both simply as "purify" and "pronounce clean" preserve only partially.

The phrase 'al-peNei hasSadeh ("over the surface of the field") uses a construct noun peNei ("face/surface of", H6440J) governing "the field," a construction meaning the bird is released into open, unenclosed land.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ve-tihar ("and he will declare pure") as καὶ καθαρὸς ἔσται ("and he will be pure"), shifting from the priest's declarative act to a stative description of the person's condition. The Vulgate similarly renders it as ut jure purgetur ("that he may be duly purged"), also framing the clause as the person's resulting state rather than the priest's pronouncement present in the Hebrew piel verb.