Leviticus 22:6

Summary

The verse describes a person who touches something unclean: that person becomes ritually impure until evening and is forbidden from eating sacred offerings unless they have washed their body with water. The Hebrew presents this as a casuistic (case-based) legal formula: condition, consequence, and an exception clause.

Key words

• nefesh ("anyone", H5315J) — literally "soul" or "living being"; a grammatically feminine noun used generically for "a person," not specifying sex.
• tigga' ("it will touch", H5060) — qal imperfect, marking the touching as a hypothetical or recurring future case, setting up the legal condition.
• tame'ah ("it will be unclean", H2930A) — a sequential perfect joined by the vav-consecutive to the preceding imperfect; this pairing (imperfect → vav + perfect) is the standard Hebrew way of expressing "if X happens, then Y follows."
• ki 'im ("except", H3588B + H0518B) — a compound particle combining "that" and "if," functioning together as "unless/except," introducing the one condition that lifts the prohibition.
• besar-o ("his body", H1320 construct + H9023) — literally "his flesh," a construct form meaning "the flesh of him," referring to the physical body needing washing.

What the text says

The sentence structure follows a typical Hebrew case-law pattern: a subject clause defined by a relative pronoun (nefesh 'asher — "a person who...") introduces the condition, followed by a chain of verbs describing consequences. The imperfect verb tigga' ("touches") sets the hypothetical action, and the following verb tame'ah ("will be unclean") is grammatically a perfect form but functions as a continuation of the imperfect's time frame because of the attached vav — this is the vav-consecutive construction common in legal and narrative Hebrew, where "if A (imperfect), then B (vav + perfect)" expresses a single logical sequence rather than two separate statements.

The prohibition against eating ha-qodashim ("the holy things", H6944G) is stated with a double negative-conditional structure: ve-lo' ("and not") plus the exception marker ki 'im ("except"). This creates a formula meaning "he will not eat... except if he has washed," where the perfect verb rachatz ("he has washed", H7364) marks a completed prior action as the qualifying condition for permission to eat.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew bo ("in it/him", H9033) is a singular suffix referring back to an unclean object from the preceding context. The LXX renders this with the plural pronoun autōn ("of them"), implying a plural antecedent. The BSB translation specifies "the man," while the Hebrew nefesh is grammatically feminine and not marked for the sex of the person. The Vulgate's laverit carnem suam aqua ("has washed his flesh with water") closely follows the Hebrew rachatz besaro ba-mayim, while the LXX's lousētai to sōma autou hydati ("washes his body with water") uses a middle-voice verb emphasizing self-washing, a nuance not explicit in the Hebrew qal form rachatz.