Leviticus 16:7

Summary

The verse describes an action performed by the officiant (implied "he," referring to Aaron in the wider context): taking two male goats and positioning them before Yehovah, specifically at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. The sentence continues a narrative sequence of ritual instructions using two sequential verb forms.

Key words

• la.Kach ("he will take", H3947) — qal sequential perfect; continues the chain of prescribed actions begun earlier in the passage, indicating "and he shall take" as the next step.
• se.'i.Rim ("male goats", H8163) — masculine plural noun with the definite article ha ("the", H9009) attached, specifying these are the male goats already introduced in the ritual context, not just any goats.
• he.'e.Mid ("he will station", H5975) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem marks that the subject causes the goats to stand/be positioned, rather than the goats standing on their own.
• f.Nei ("before", H6440) — masculine plural construct form of "face," used idiomatically with the preposition li ("to", H9005) to mean "before/in the presence of."
• Pe.tach ("entrance of", H6607) and 'O.hel ("tent of", H0168) — both masculine singular construct nouns, chaining together to form "entrance of the tent of meeting," a construct chain building a single locative phrase.

What the text says

The verse is built on two sequential perfect verbs, la.Kach ("he will take", H3947) and he.'e.Mid ("he will station", H5975), both introduced by the narrative vav ve ("and", H9001). This construction marks continuation within a sequence of prescribed ritual actions, a common feature in legal/ritual Hebrew prose where each step follows logically from the previous one. The verb he.'e.Mid is in the hiphil stem, which is causative: the subject does not merely place the goats but causes them to stand, which the two English versions render simply as "present."

The object of the first verb is marked by the untranslated direct object marker 'et (H0853) followed by she.Nei ("two", H8147) in construct with ha.se.'i.Rim ("the male goats", H8163) — a dual/plural construct phrase meaning "the two of the male goats." The second clause locates the action spatially through a stack of construct nouns: li-f.Nei Yehovah ("before Yehovah") and Pe.tach 'O.hel mo.'Ed ("entrance of the tent of meeting"), the latter functioning appositionally to further specify where "before Yehovah" takes place.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (VULCLEM) omits an explicit equivalent for the initial verb la.Kach ("he will take", H3947) and the conjunction ve ("and", H9001), beginning directly with "duos hircos stare faciet" ("he will cause the two goats to stand"), collapsing the two Hebrew sequential actions into a single verbal expression. The LXX (λήμψεται... καὶ στήσει) and the Hebrew both preserve two distinct verbs in sequence, matching the la.Kach / he.'e.Mid structure more closely than the Vulgate does.