Leviticus 18:23

Summary

Leviticus 18:23 prohibits sexual contact between a man and any animal, and separately prohibits a woman from presenting herself to an animal for mating. The verse closes by classifying this act with the term tevel ("confusion", H8397).

Key words

• behemah ("animal", H0929) — feminine singular noun, appearing twice (lines 4 and 19), once as the object of the man's prohibition and once in the woman's prohibition.
• titten ("you will give", H5414O) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular; the imperfect form expresses a durative or future prohibition, addressed grammatically to a male subject.
• shokhavtekha ("your copulation", H7903 + H9021) — feminine singular noun in construct with a second-person masculine possessive suffix, forming the direct object of titten.
• ta'amod ("she will stand", H5975J) — qal imperfect, third person feminine singular, with ishah ("a woman", H0802G) as its subject; parallels titten in structure but shifts to a feminine verb.
• tevel ("confusion", H8397) — masculine singular noun functioning as a predicate nominative with the pronoun hu ("it", H1931), closing the verse with a categorical label.

What the text says

The verse divides into two parallel clauses, each built on a negated qal imperfect verb (lo... titten / lo... ta'amod), one addressed to a male subject and one to a female subject (ishah). In the first clause, the construct phrase shokhavtekha ("your copulation") with the second-masculine-singular suffix functions as the object given (titten), followed by the infinitive le-tame'ah ("to become unclean", H2930A) with the preposition bah ("in her/it") indicating the animal as the means of defilement. In the second clause, the woman's prohibition uses a different verb, ta'amod ("she will stand"), followed by lifnei ("before", from penei, H6440G) plus behemah, and the purpose infinitive le-riv'ah ("to lie with it", H7250) with a third-feminine-singular suffix referring to the animal.

The verse closes with the nominal clause tevel hu — literally "confusion, it [is]" — using the demonstrative pronoun hu to assign a categorical designation to the acts just described, without a verb of being, which is standard in Hebrew nominal sentences.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders behemah as tetrapoun ("four-footed animal"), a more specific zoological term than the Hebrew behemah, which broadly denotes "animal" or "beast" without specifying limb count. The Vulgate uses pecore ("cattle/livestock") and jumento ("beast of burden"), narrowing the semantic range compared to the more general Hebrew term. Where the Hebrew closes with the noun tevel ("confusion"), the LXX uses the adjective myseron ("abominable/loathsome"), and the Vulgate uses scelus ("crime"), each shifting the nuance of the final classification from a specific technical term to a broader moral or emotional descriptor.