Leviticus 2:9

Summary

The verse describes the priest's action on the grain offering: he removes its memorial portion and burns it on the altar. The text specifies this burnt portion becomes "a fire offering of a pleasing odor" for Yehovah.

Key words

• he.Rim ("he will lift up", H7311A) — hiphil causative, sequential perfect form; denotes the priest's act of physically removing/setting apart a portion, continuing the narrative sequence from the previous verse.
• 'az.Ka.ra.Ta ("memorial offering", H0234) — feminine singular noun in construct state ("X of..."), taking the pronominal suffix -ah ("its"); designates the specific portion of the grain offering set aside as a "memorial" of the whole.
• hik.Tir ("he will make [it] smoke", H6999A) — hiphil causative, sequential perfect; continues the same verbal chain as he.Rim, marking the second required action (burning) after the first (removing).
• 'i.Sheh ("a fire offering of", H0801) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linking to the following noun rei.ach ("odor of"); describes the nature of what results from the burning.
• ni.cho.ach ("soothing", H5207) — modifies rei.ach ("odor of"), together forming the construct chain "odor of soothing," qualifying the fire offering as pleasing.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two sequential perfect verbs in the hiphil stem — he.Rim ("he will lift up") and hik.Tir ("he will make smoke") — both introduced by the narrative ve ("and"). This construction chains two priestly actions as steps in one continuous procedure: first the priest lifts/removes a portion "from the grain offering" (min-ha-min.chah), specifically the part identified as "its memorial offering" ('et-'az.ka.ra.tah), using the direct object marker 'et to mark this noun as the grammatical object of the removal. The suffix -ah on 'az.ka.ra.tah ties the memorial portion back to the grain offering mentioned earlier in the clause.

The second verb, hik.Tir, takes as its implicit object the portion just removed, and is directed "toward the altar" (ha-miz.be.chah), where the final he functions as a directional marker rather than the definite article suffix. The result of this burning is described through a construct chain: 'i.sheh ("fire offering of") followed by rei.ach ("odor of") followed by ni.cho.ach ("soothing"), producing "a fire offering, an odor of soothing," directed la-Yehovah ("to Yehovah"). The construct chains here compress what other languages express with multiple prepositional phrases into linked noun pairs, each noun modifying the next.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'az.Ka.ra.Ta ("memorial offering", H0234) as τὸ μνημόσυνον ("the memorial"), matching the Hebrew sense, but shifts he.Rim ("he will lift up") to ἀφελεῖ ("he will remove/take away"), a near-synonym emphasizing separation rather than lifting. The Vulgate's tollet ("he will take/lift") aligns more closely with the Hebrew's lifting sense. The LXX also renders 'i.sheh ("fire offering of") as κάρπωμα ("burnt offering/fruit offering"), a term not tied etymologically to fire the way 'i.sheh is, whereas the Vulgate's adolebit ("he will burn") keeps the fire imagery embedded in the verb itself rather than in a noun.