Leviticus 18:28

Summary

The verse warns that the land will vomit out its inhabitants if they defile it, just as it vomited out the nation that lived there before them. The same verbal root appears twice, but in two different grammatical forms describing two related but distinct actions.

Key words

• taki ("it will vomit up", H6958) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, 3rd feminine singular referring to ha'aretz ("the land"). The imperfect aspect marks this as an ongoing or future action, and the hiphil stem casts the land as actively causing the expulsion.
• ha'aretz ("the land", H0776G) — feminine singular noun, subject of the verb taki, personified as the agent that expels its inhabitants.
• tama'akhem ("your making unclean", H2930A) — piel (intensive) infinitive with 2nd masculine plural suffix, governed by the preposition be ("when/in"). This construction expresses the circumstance or cause under which the vomiting occurs: "in your defiling it."
• ka'ah ("it vomited up", H6958) — qal (simple) perfect, 3rd feminine singular, same root as taki but in the basic stem and completed aspect, referring to a past, finished event concerning the previous nation.
• goy ("nation", H1471A) — masculine singular noun with definite article, the previous inhabitants of the land, object of the qal verb ka'ah.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a single root (H6958, "to vomit") used twice with contrasting grammatical forms. The first occurrence, taki, is hiphil imperfect — the causative stem marks the land as an agent producing the expulsion, and the imperfect aspect leaves the action open as ongoing or future, tied to the condition introduced by be-tama'akhem ("when/in your defiling it"), itself a piel infinitive expressing an intensive, repeated action of defilement. The second occurrence, ka'ah, is qal perfect — the simple stem and completed aspect present the land's earlier expulsion of the previous nation (ha-goy) as a settled, finished fact, introduced by the comparative particle ka'asher ("just as"). The grammar thus draws a structural parallel between two events using one root, but marks them differently in stem (causative vs. simple) and aspect (unfinished/conditional vs. completed), a distinction not visible in translations that render both simply as "vomit" or "vomited."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the land's action with προσοχθίσῃ ("be greatly displeased/loathe"), a verb of disgust rather than the physical image of vomiting present in the Hebrew taki and ka'ah. The Vulgate preserves the vomiting image with evomat and evomuit, matching the Hebrew's repeated root more closely than the LXX does. The BSB and SBLIBRE translations retain "vomit/spew" language, aligning with the Hebrew and Vulgate rather than the LXX's abstract rendering.