Leviticus 16:20

Summary

The verse marks a transition in the Day of Atonement ritual: once the officiant finishes making atonement for the sanctuary, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, he brings forward the live goat. The Hebrew uses two sequential verb forms to move the narrative from the completion of one action to the start of the next.

Key words

• khilLah ("he will finish", H3615G) — piel sequential perfect; the piel stem gives an intensive/completive sense ("finish thoroughly"), and the sequential perfect links this action to what precedes it in the ritual sequence.
• kaPer ("making atonement for", H3722A) — piel infinitive, governed by the preceding preposition mi ("from", H9006); the construction mi.kaPer literally expresses "from atoning," i.e., ceasing the act of atonement once it is complete.
• Kodesh ("holy place", H6944J) — definite singular noun marking the first object of the atonement, preceded by the untranslated direct object marker 'et (H0853).
• hikRiv ("he will present", H7126H) — hiphil sequential perfect; the hiphil (causative) stem indicates that the subject causes the goat to come forward/be brought, rather than the goat moving on its own.
• sa'Ir heChai ("male goat" H8163B + "living" H2416A) — the noun sa'Ir is qualified by the adjective Chai with its own definite article (he., H9009), producing "the goat, the living one," emphasizing its living state as distinct from the goat already used in the preceding ritual.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative vav (ve, H9001) attached to khilLah, continuing the sequence of actions from the preceding verses. The phrase mi.kaPer combines the preposition "from" with the piel infinitive "atoning," forming an idiom meaning "when he finishes atoning" — the completion is expressed through the combination of the finite verb khilLah ("he will finish") and this infinitival phrase rather than through a single verb of completion. Three objects follow, each introduced by the direct object marker 'et and joined by ve ("and"): ha.Kodesh ("the holy place"), 'Ohel mo'Ed ("tent of meeting," a construct pair meaning "tent of the meeting"), and ha.mizBeach ("the altar"). These three are the objects of the atoning action just completed.

The second half of the verse begins with another narrative vav attached to hikRiv, a hiphil sequential perfect indicating a new, causative action: the subject brings the goat forward. The object is ha.sa'Ir he.Chai, "the goat, the living one," where the adjective Chai carries its own article, syntactically mirroring the noun it modifies and stressing that this goat is alive, in contrast to ritual elements already consumed or used earlier in the chapter's sequence.

Differences between versions

The LXX adds a clause not present in the Hebrew word list given: καὶ περὶ τῶν ἱερέων καθαριεῖ ("and he shall cleanse concerning the priests"), an additional object of purification not corresponding to any Hebrew word in this verse's data. The Vulgate's emundaverit ("he shall have cleansed") renders the khilLah/kaPer combination with a single verb of cleansing, differing from the Hebrew's two-part "finish atoning" construction. The BSB and SBLIBRE both supply "Aaron" as the explicit subject, though no Hebrew word in this verse names him.