Leviticus 18:29

Summary

Leviticus 18:29 states that anyone who commits any of the previously listed abominations will be cut off from among their people. The verse shifts grammatically from a singular hypothetical subject to a plural group of "persons," marking a transition from individual conditional cases to collective consequence.

Key words

• ya'aseh ("he will do", H6213A) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular; expresses a hypothetical/future individual action within the conditional clause "whoever will do."
• nikhretu ("they will be cut off", H3772I) — niphal (passive) perfect with sequential vav; the passive voice means the persons are the recipients of the cutting-off, not the agents.
• nefashot ("persons/souls", H5315J) — feminine plural noun; despite the earlier singular 'asher ("who"), the consequence clause names plural nefashot, shifting the grammatical number.
• 'osot ("[the ones] doing", H6213A) — qal active participle, feminine plural; describes the nefashot as those "who do" the abominations, restating the action from the participle's perspective rather than the finite verb's.
• to'evot ("abominations", H8441) — feminine plural noun with definite article and demonstrative 'eleh ("these", H428), pointing back to a previously enumerated list.

What the text says

The verse opens with the conditional particle ki (H3588A, "for/if") followed by kol-'asher ya'aseh — literally "all who he-will-do" — a distributive construction where kol ("every", H3605) plus the relative 'asher creates the sense of "whoever," even though the verb ya'aseh is grammatically singular. This singular verb describes the individual case: any single person who commits any of "these abominations" (hato'evot ha'eleh).

The clause then pivots with the vav-consecutive on nikhretu, moving to the consequence. Here the subject becomes plural: hannefashot ha'osot ("the persons who do"). The passive niphal form of nikhretu indicates that the cutting-off happens to the persons, without specifying an agent — the Hebrew does not state who performs the cutting off, only that it happens. The final phrase, miqerev 'ammam ("from among their people", H7130G construct + H5971B + suffix), specifies the location from which they are removed — the community itself, not a geographic or national reference.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the entire verse with a consistent grammatical singular: "Omnis anima, quæ fecerit... peribit" ("Every soul who does... will perish"), smoothing over the singular-to-plural shift present in the Hebrew and the LXX (which preserves the same shift with singular ποιήσῃ and plural ἐξολεθρευθήσονται/ποιοῦσαι). Additionally, the Vulgate's verb "peribit" ("will perish") differs semantically from the Hebrew's passive "will be cut off" (nikhretu) and the LXX's parallel ἐξολεθρευθήσονται ("will be utterly destroyed/cut off"), offering a different image for the consequence than the Hebrew's spatial/social language of removal "from among the people."