Leviticus 19:26

Summary

Leviticus 19:26 issues three prohibitions to the community (second person plural): against eating in relation to blood, against practicing nachash ("divination"), and against practicing 'onen ("soothsaying"). All three verbs appear in the imperfect with the negation lo' ("not"), a standard construction for prohibitive commands in Biblical Hebrew.

Key words

• lo' ("not", H3808) — repeated three times, one negation per prohibition, marking each clause as an independent command rather than one continuous restriction.
• to.khe.Lu ("you must eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, second person masculine plural; the base stem (not intensified) simply denotes the act of eating.
• 'al ("with"/"upon", H5921A) — a preposition whose basic spatial sense is "upon" or "over"; its exact contribution to the meaning of the first clause depends on how one reads its relation to dam ("blood").
• te.na.cha.Shu ("you will practice divination", H5172) — piel imperfect, an intensive/factitive stem indicating deliberate, repeated performance of the practice named by the root.
• te.'o.Ne.nu ("you will practice soothsaying", H6049B) — also piel imperfect, paralleling tenachashu in form and function, paired by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002).

What the text says

The verse is built as three parallel prohibitions, each using lo' plus a second-person plural imperfect verb — a common Hebrew pattern for binding, general prohibitions addressed to a group. The first clause, lo' to'khelu 'al ha-dam ("you must not eat 'al the blood"), pairs the ordinary verb "to eat" with the preposition 'al, whose core meaning is "upon" or "over" rather than "together with." The two following clauses share the same grammatical shape: piel imperfect verbs built from the roots nachash and 'onen, both denoting forms of divinatory practice. The piel stem intensifies the verbal action, suggesting active, professional, or repeated engagement in these practices rather than a single incidental act. The conjunction ve- joins the second and third prohibitions into a linked pair, distinguishing them slightly from the first, standalone clause about blood.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the first clause as "cum sanguine" ("with blood"), interpreting 'al as accompaniment rather than the more literal "over" or "upon." The Septuagint diverges significantly here, reading epi tōn oreōn ("on the mountains") instead of any reference to blood, showing a different underlying text or interpretive tradition for this clause. For the second and third prohibitions, the LXX specifies concrete practices — oiōnizesthai ("taking omens") and ornithoskopeisthai ("watching birds") — narrowing the general Hebrew terms nachash and 'onen into specific augury techniques. The Vulgate's third clause, "nec observabitis somnia" ("nor will you observe dreams"), also narrows the Hebrew te'onenu toward dream-interpretation, a specification not present in the Hebrew text itself.