Leviticus 20:18

Summary

Leviticus 20:18 states the legal consequence for a man who has sexual relations with a woman during her menstrual period: both parties are described as "uncovering" reproductive anatomy associated with her blood flow, and the verse concludes with the penalty that both must be cut off from their people.

Key words

• davah ("menstruating", H1739) — feminine singular adjective describing the woman's physiological state at the time of the act.
• gillah ("he will uncover", H1540I) — piel (intensive) verb, sequential perfect, describing the man's action of exposing "her nakedness" ('ervatah).
• he'erah ("he has made naked", H6168) — hiphil (causative) perfect, a second, distinct verb applied to the same subject (the man) regarding "her spring" (meqorah).
• gilletah ("she has uncovered", H1540I) — the same piel root as gillah, but now perfect and third-person feminine, attributing a parallel act of "uncovering" to the woman herself regarding "the spring of her blood."
• nikhretu ("they will be cut off", H3772I) — niphal (passive) sequential perfect, plural, stating the shared consequence for both parties.

What the text says

The sentence opens with 'ish 'asher yishkav ("a man who will lie with"), an imperfect verb inside a relative clause, setting up a conditional case rather than a narrated event. The Hebrew then uses three separate verbs to describe what happens to the woman's body: gillah ("uncover," piel) applied to 'ervatah ("her nakedness"), he'erah ("laid bare," hiphil) applied to meqorah ("her spring"), and then, shifting subject to the woman herself (marked by the independent pronoun hi', "she"), gilletah ("uncovered," piel perfect) applied to meqor dameiha ("the spring of her blood"). This structure assigns two distinct uncovering-verbs to the man's action and a third, matching verb to the woman's own action, creating a symmetry between the two parties before the shared penalty is stated. The final clause uses the niphal (passive) form nikhretu, grammatically marking the subjects (sheneihem, "both of them") as undergoing the action of being cut off, rather than performing it, and specifies the location "from among their people" (miqerev 'amam).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders davah as ἀποκαθημένης ("sitting apart"), describing a state of separation rather than the physiological term used in the Hebrew. The Vulgate's "in fluxu menstruo" stays closer to the bodily sense. Additionally, where the Hebrew Masoretic Text uses three separate uncovering-verbs (two for the man, one for the woman), the Vulgate compresses this into two clauses — "revelaverit turpitudinem ejus" for the man and "aperuerit fontem sanguinis sui" for the woman — merging the man's double action into a single verb.