Leviticus 22:7

Summary

This verse describes a temporal sequence: after the sun sets, a person becomes clean, and only then may he eat from the sacred offerings. The final clause gives the reason: the offerings constitute his food.

Key words

• Va' ("it will go", H0935G) — sequential perfect (vav + perfect) continuing a chain of consequence; here it marks "the sun will go [down]" as the first event in the sequence.
• taHer ("he will be clean", H2891) — second sequential perfect, chained to the previous verb by narrative vav, marking the resulting state after sunset.
• yoKhal ("he will eat", H0398) — imperfect form, marking the action that follows once the sequence of sunset-then-cleanness is complete.
• koda.Shim ("holy things", H6944G) — masculine plural noun with definite article, referring to the sacred offerings as a category.
• lachM-o ("his food/bread", H3899G + H9023) — construct noun with 1st person... actually 3rd person possessive suffix "his," fronted before the independent pronoun Hu' ("it/he", H1931) to form the closing nominal clause.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects introduced by the narrative vav: u.Va' ha.Shemesh ("and the sun will go [down]") followed by ve.taHer ("and he will be clean"). This construction, typical of casuistic (case-law) formulations, presents two events as a linked temporal-logical sequence rather than as independent statements — the setting of the sun and the resulting clean status are grammatically bound together.

The next clause shifts to ve.'aChar ("and after") plus the imperfect yoKhal ("he will eat"), marking a further step in the sequence: eating from ha.koda.Shim ("the holy things") occurs only after the prior two conditions are satisfied.

The final clause, introduced by the particle ki ("for", H3588A), states the reason: lachM-o Hu' — literally "his food, it [is]." The possessive noun lachM-o is placed before the pronoun Hu', an emphatic word order that foregrounds "his food" as the topic before the pronoun closes the clause.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the temporal sequence with τότε ("then") explicitly marking the third step, matching ve.'aChar. The Vulgate compresses the first two Hebrew clauses into a single participial construction, tunc mundatus vescetur ("then, having been cleansed, he will eat"), rather than preserving them as two separate sequential verbs as in the Hebrew. In the final clause, the Hebrew singular lachM-o ("his food/bread") is rendered as a plural "they are his food" in the BSB and SBLIBRE translations, reflecting the plural referent koda.Shim ("holy things") rather than the grammatically singular noun lachM-o itself.