Leviticus 16:18

Summary

The verse describes a sequence of actions: the officiant goes out to the altar located before Yehovah, performs atonement upon it, and then takes blood from both the bull and the goat to apply to the horns of the altar all around.

Key words

• ya.Tza' ("he will go out", H3318G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain of ritual actions.
• khi.Per ("he will make atonement", H3722A) — piel (intensive) stem, denoting an intensive or effective action performed on the altar itself, marked by the preposition 'a.La ("on", H5921A) with pronominal suffix "it/him".
• miz.Be.ach ("altar", H4196) — appears twice (lines 5 and 30), masculine singular, anchoring both the location of atonement and the object receiving blood.
• Dam ("blood of", H1818) — construct form, appearing twice to link the blood specifically to its source: ha.Par ("the bull", H6499) and sa.'Ir ("male goat", H8163B).
• kar.Not ("horns of", H7161A) — feminine plural construct, specifying the architectural part of the altar receiving the blood application.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence chains four sequential perfect verbs joined by the narrative ve ("and", H9001): ya.Tza' ("he will go out"), khi.Per ("he will make atonement"), la.Kach ("he will take"), and na.Tan ("he will put"). This verbal chain construction presents the actions as a continuous, ordered sequence rather than isolated events. The altar is identified with a relative clause: 'a.Sher li-f.nei-Yehovah ("which [is] before Yehovah"), using the construct noun f.nei ("before", literally "face of", H6440G) to describe its position relative to the divine name.

The piel verb khi.Per ("he will make atonement", H3722A) takes the altar itself as its object via the preposition-plus-suffix 'a.Lav ("on it"), meaning the atoning action described here is directed toward the altar structure rather than toward a person. The blood application that follows uses the partitive preposition mi ("some of", H9006) twice — mi-Dam ha.Par ("some of the blood of the bull") and u-mi-Dam ha.sa.'Ir ("and some of the blood of the goat") — indicating that only a portion of each animal's blood is used, not the whole quantity. The final verb na.Tan ("he will put", H5414H) governs the object placed 'al qar.Not ha.miz.Be.ach sa.Viv ("on the horns of the altar, all around"), with sa.Viv ("all around", H5439G) specifying that the application covers the horns on every side of the altar structure.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders khi.Per ("he will make atonement", H3722A) as "oret pro se" ("let him pray for himself"), which shifts the sense from an action performed on the altar to a prayer performed by the officiant for himself. The Hebrew and the LXX (ἐξιλάσεται ἐπ' αὐτοῦ, "he will make atonement upon it") both keep the altar as the object of the atoning action, while the Vulgate's phrasing introduces a reflexive personal dimension not present in the other two texts.