Leviticus 15:7

Summary

The verse establishes a purity rule for anyone who touches the body of a man with a discharge (zav, H2100). Such a person must wash his garments, bathe in water, and remain ritually unclean until evening.

Key words

ha.noGea' ("the one touching", H5060) — qal participle, masculine singular, functioning substantively with the definite article ha (H9009) as "the one who touches." This construction identifies a person by their action rather than a fixed noun.

ha.Zav ("the one discharging", H2100) — qal participle, masculine singular, again substantized by the article. It names the source of impurity as an ongoing state of discharge, not a completed event.

yekhaBes ("he will wash", H3526) — piel imperfect. The piel stem intensifies the action of washing compared to the simple qal, and the imperfect aspect marks it as the required or resulting action following contact.

ve.raChatz ("and he will wash/bathe", H7364) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative chain begun by the imperfect verb. This verb describes bathing the body, distinct from yekhaBes, which governs the garments.

ve.taMe' ("and he will be unclean", H2930) — qal sequential perfect, the third link in the sequence, stating the resulting status that lasts until evening ('Arev, H6153).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two substantized participles: ha.noGea' ("the one touching") and ha.Zav ("the one discharging"). Both use the qal participle form with the definite article, a common Hebrew way to designate a person by an ongoing action or condition rather than naming them directly. The subject of the sentence is thus "the toucher," defined by contact with besar ("flesh/body", H1320, construct form) of "the discharger."

The verb sequence that follows moves from imperfect (yekhaBes) to two sequential perfects (ve.raChatz, ve.taMe'), a standard Biblical Hebrew narrative chain where the initial imperfect sets the tense and the vav-consecutive perfects continue the same time frame. This produces three consecutive actions/states: washing garments, bathing in water, and remaining unclean until evening. The distinction between yekhaBes (piel, intensive, applied to garments) and raChatz (qal, applied to the body) reflects two separate washing actions with different grammatical stems, though both are rendered as "wash" in English translations like the BSB.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders besar ("flesh", H1320) as χρωτός ("skin/body surface"), while the Vulgate uses carnem ("flesh"), closely following the Hebrew. The Hebrew's two distinct verbs for washing (yekhaBes for garments, piel stem; raChatz for the body, qal stem) are both translated with a single English verb "wash"/"bathe" in the BSB and SBLIBRE, collapsing a morphological distinction visible in the Hebrew text.