Leviticus 19:11

Summary

Leviticus 19:11 issues three prohibitions using the negative particle with the imperfect verb form (a common construction for enduring legal commands): against stealing, against deceiving, and against dealing falsely. The final clause specifies the object of these wrongs as "a man" against "his fellow," shifting the grammatical structure from a collective "you all" to a distributive individual scope.

Key words

• tignevu ("you will steal", H1589) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, addressing the community as a collective "you all."
• tekhachashu ("you will deceive", H3584) — piel imperfect, intensive stem, denoting active deception or denial, not merely passive falsehood.
• teshakeru ("you will deal falsely", H8266) — piel imperfect, intensive stem, from the root associated with sheker ("falsehood"); denotes false dealing or false speech.
• 'ish ("anyone", H0376I) — masculine singular noun, functioning distributively ("each one") despite the preceding verbs being plural.
• 'amito ("his fellow", H5997) — masculine singular noun in construct form with a possessive suffix ("his"), a term specific to describing a member of the same community.

What the text says

The verse is built as three parallel negative commands, each formed with lo' ("not", H3808) followed by a 2nd person masculine plural imperfect verb: tignevu, tekhachashu, and teshakeru. This plural form addresses the audience collectively, as a group bound by the same set of prohibitions. The first verb (tignevu) is in the qal (simple) stem, while the second and third (tekhachashu, teshakeru) are in the piel (intensive) stem, marking a shift toward more deliberate or repeated forms of dishonest action — deception and false dealing rather than a single act.

The final phrase, 'ish ba'amito ("anyone with his fellow"), attaches grammatically only to the third verb (teshakeru) but by sense qualifies the whole set of prohibitions. Here the text moves from the plural "you all" to the distributive singular "a man" — 'ish — paired with 'amito, "his fellow," a term built from the root H5997 that specifically denotes a member of one's own community rather than a stranger. The suffix "his" (-o, H9023) ties the fellow explicitly to the individual subject, producing a structure that reads roughly as "no one is to deal falsely, each with his fellow."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the third clause with a singular verb, οὐ συκοφαντήσει ἕκαστος τὸν πλησίον ("he shall not falsely accuse, each one, the neighbor"), matching Hebrew's shift to the distributive singular 'ish, though only for this final clause; the first two verbs remain plural (κλέψετε, ψεύσεσθε) as in the Hebrew. The Vulgate similarly shifts to a singular verb only in the third clause: "decipiet unusquisque proximum suum" ("each one will deceive his neighbor"), while the first two verbs stay plural ("facietis," "mentiemini"). Modern translations such as the BSB and SBLIBRE render all three prohibitions in a uniform plural or generalized form, which does not reflect the switch in grammatical number that both the Hebrew and the ancient versions preserve in the final clause.