Leviticus 20:14

Summary

Leviticus 20:14 addresses the case of a man who takes both a woman and her mother as wives. The text labels this act zimmah ("wickedness", H2154) and prescribes death by fire for all three parties, stating the purpose is that such wickedness not remain "in the midst" of the community.

Key words

• yiqqach ("he will take", H3947I) — qal imperfect, describing the man's action of taking a wife; the imperfect form frames this as a potential/future case ("if a man takes...").
• zimmah ("wickedness", H2154) — appears twice (lines 11 and 24), a feminine singular noun naming the act itself as a category of transgression, not merely describing it.
• hi' ("it/she", H1931) — personal pronoun functioning as a copula-like link, asserting identity: "wickedness, it [is]."
• yisrefu ("people will burn", H8313) — qal imperfect, third person masculine plural, an impersonal/generalized "they" indicating the punishment is carried out by the community, not naming a specific agent.
• tihyeh ("it will be", H1961) — qal imperfect of the verb "to be," negated by lo' ("not", H3808), forming the concluding purpose clause "wickedness will not be."

What the text says

The verse opens with ve'ish 'asher ("and a man who", H9002 + H0376G + H0834A), a construction that introduces a conditional legal case — a common pattern in this chapter. The relative clause yiqqach 'et-'ishah ve'et-'immah ("he will take a woman and her mother") specifies the prohibited scenario using two direct object markers (H0853) joined by ve ("and"), marking both the woman and her mother as objects of the same verb yiqqach.

The clause zimmah hi' ("wickedness, it [is]") places the predicate noun zimmah before the pronoun hi', a common Hebrew nominal-sentence structure that identifies the preceding action as belonging to the category zimmah. The punishment clause ba'esh yisrefu 'oto ve'et-hen ("in the fire they will burn him and them") uses the plural pronominal suffix -hen (H9039, feminine plural "them") to refer to both women together, while 'oto (H9033, "him") refers to the man singularly — grammatically distinguishing the one male party from the two female parties within the same punitive clause.

The final clause velo'-tihyeh zimmah betokhekhem ("and wickedness will not be in your midst") uses tokh ("midst of", H8432) in construct with the suffix -khem ("your", H9026, masculine plural), locating the stated goal spatially within the community addressed as "you" (plural).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the Hebrew 'ish ("a man") with a relative pronoun ὃς ("who") without an explicit noun for "man," beginning directly with the conditional. The Vulgate's duxerit ("he will have led/married") and its added phrase "supra uxorem filiam" reflects a different syntactic framing of the woman-and-mother relationship than the Hebrew's straightforward double object construction with 'et. The Hebrew zimmah ("wickedness") is rendered by the LXX as ἀνόμημα/ἀνομία ("lawlessness/transgression") and by the Vulgate as scelus/nefas ("crime"/"impious act"), each version selecting a term with a distinct semantic range rather than a direct lexical equivalent of zimmah.