Leviticus 21:16

Summary

The verse records that Yehovah spoke to Moses, introducing the speech that follows. It is a standard narrative formula marking the transition into direct divine discourse.

Key words

va-y.da.Ber ("and he spoke", H1696G) — piel verb with narrative vav, placing the action in sequence with what precedes it in the text; the piel stem here conveys the act of speaking as a complete, deliberate utterance.

Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — proper name functioning as the subject of the verb; it identifies the speaker.

'el- ("to", H0413) — preposition marking the addressee of the speech, directing the action toward Moses.

mo.Sheh ("Moses", H4872) — proper name, the recipient of the speech, marked by the preceding preposition.

le.Mor ("saying", H0559) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed preposition, functioning to introduce the content of the speech that follows; literally "to say" or "in saying."

What the text says

The verse follows a fixed syntactic pattern common in the legal and priestly material of the Hebrew Bible: verb + subject + prepositional phrase + infinitive of speech. The narrative vav on va-y.da.Ber ("and he spoke", H1696G) signals continuity with the preceding narrative, linking this speech act to what has come before rather than presenting it as an isolated event. The subject Yehovah (H3068G) precedes the object marked by 'el- ("to", H0413), which introduces mo.Sheh ("Moses", H4872) as the one addressed.

The final word, le.Mor ("saying", H0559), is an infinitive construct that functions almost as a colon in English — it opens the quotation that follows in the next verses. This construction does not add new semantic content beyond marking the boundary between the narrative frame and the reported speech; it is a formulaic device used repeatedly across legal sections of the text to introduce divine instruction.

The piel stem of y.da.Ber ("he spoke", H1696G), as opposed to a simpler qal form, is conventionally used for the verb "to speak" in Biblical Hebrew and does not necessarily carry additional intensive force beyond the lexical meaning "to speak" in this stem.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text has no equivalent for a coordinating "then" as found in the BSB ("Then the LORD said to Moses"); the Hebrew narrative vav is rendered by "and" in most literal translations (e.g., RV1909 "Y"), while BSB opts for "Then" to mark narrative sequence in English idiom. The LXX (Καὶ ἐλάλησεν κύριος πρὸς Μωυσῆν λέγων) and the Vulgate (Locutusque est Dominus ad Moysen, dicens) both preserve the same basic structure as the Hebrew — verb, subject, prepositional phrase, participle/infinitive of speech — without notable divergence in content.