Leviticus 22:12

Summary

The verse addresses the case of a priest's daughter who marries a man outside the priestly line. Once this happens, she is no longer permitted to eat from the terumat ("contribution of", H8641) the ha-qodashim ("the holy things", H6944G) reserved for priestly households.

Key words

• vat- ("a daughter of", H1323G) — construct form linking her directly to kohen, establishing her status by paternal lineage rather than personal action.
• tihyeh ("she will belong", H1961) — qal imperfect, expressing a future/contingent state ("if she comes to belong to"), setting up the conditional clause introduced by ki ("if", H3588A).
• zar ("strange", H2114A) — masculine singular adjective modifying ish ("a man", H0376H); it marks the man as external to the priestly category, not as a foreigner in an ethnic sense.
• hi' ("she", H1931) — independent personal pronoun placed before the negated verb, emphasizing the subject: it is specifically she (in this new marital status) who is now barred.
• to.Khel ("she will eat", H0398) — qal imperfect negated by lo' ("not", H3808), stating the prohibition as an ongoing/future restriction rather than a single past event.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a conditional clause (ki + imperfect tihyeh) followed by a main clause marked by the emphatic pronoun hi' and the negated imperfect to.Khel. The construct chain vat-kohen ("a daughter of a priest") identifies the woman's status of origin, while the prepositional phrase le-ish zar ("to a man strange") describes the change of status through marriage — "strange" here functions relationally, meaning outside the priestly category, not a foreign nationality.

The placement of hi' right before the negated verb draws attention to the subject as the one now affected by the restriction, contrasting her former eating rights (implied by her being a priest's daughter, per the preceding verses in the chapter) with her new status. The construct phrase terumat ha-qodashim ("the contribution of the holy things") specifies the category of food from which she is now excluded — a technical term referring to portions set aside from sacred offerings for the priestly household.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders zar ("strange", H2114A) as ἀλλογενεῖ ("of another race/kind"), a phrase carrying a stronger sense of ethnic or categorical otherness than the Hebrew adjective zar, which in this context marks non-priestly status. The Vulgate paraphrases ish zar as cuilibet ex populo ("any one from the people"), making explicit what the Hebrew leaves as a general adjective — namely, that the man is a member of the general population rather than the priesthood. The SBLIBRE Spanish translation adds "que se le presentan a Yehová" ("that are presented to Yehovah"), a clarifying phrase not present in the Hebrew construct terumat ha-qodashim itself.