Leviticus 15:6

Summary

This verse extends ritual impurity to a third party: anyone who sits on an object (keli, H3627) previously sat upon by the man with the discharge (ha-zav, H2100H) must wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. The verse continues the casuistic legal pattern found throughout Leviticus 15, describing contact impurity by transfer.

Key words

• ha-yoshev ("the one who sits", H3427) — qal participle with definite article, functioning as a substantive: "the sitter," i.e., whoever performs this action, not a specific named person.
• keli ("article/vessel", H3627) — masculine singular noun, the generic object of contact; the text does not specify what kind of item.
• ha-zav ("the one discharging", H2100H) — qal participle with article, the technical term for the man with the bodily discharge discussed throughout the chapter.
• yekhabbes ("he will wash", H3526H) — piel imperfect, an intensive stem indicating a thorough washing action, applied to garments (begadav, H0899B, "his garments").
• tame' ("he will be unclean", H2930A) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), marking the final resulting state in the narrative-legal chain.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a substantival participle, ha-yoshev ("the one who sits", H3427), which functions as the grammatical subject of the whole verse — a common construction in Levitical case law for introducing a hypothetical actor. This subject is qualified by a relative clause introduced by asher ("which/who", H0834A): the keli ("article", H3627) is defined as the one the zav ("the discharging one", H2100H) "will sit on" (yeshev, H3427, qal imperfect), using the same verbal root as the opening participle, linking the two actions through repetition of the verb "to sit."

The consequence is expressed through a chain of verbs: first yekhabbes ("he will wash", H3526H), a piel imperfect denoting the intensive washing of "his garments" (begadav, H0899B), followed by two vav-consecutive perfects, rachatz ("he will wash [himself]", H7364) and tame' ("he will be unclean", H2930A). This vav-consecutive chain (rule of "sequential perfect") is typical of Hebrew legal prose: each perfect verb continues the temporal/logical sequence set up by the initial imperfect, producing a fixed procedural order — wash clothes, bathe in water, remain unclean until evening (ad ha-arev, H6153).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders keli (H3627, "article/vessel") as skeuous ("vessel/object"), a fairly literal match. The Vulgate, however, omits an explicit noun corresponding to keli altogether, using instead "ubi ille sederat" ("where he had sat"), shifting from an object-based description to a locational one. The BSB's "furniture" is an interpretive translation choice not present in the Hebrew term itself, which is more generically "article" or "object."