Leviticus 22:9

Summary

The verse instructs that the priests must keep mishmarti ("my duty/charge", H4931) so that they do not bear sin because of it and so avoid dying — the death being explicitly tied to the act of profaning it. The passage closes with a first-person divine self-identification, ani YHWH ("I am Yehovah"), who is described as the one mekaddesham ("sanctifying them", H6942).

Key words

• sha.me.Ru ("they will keep", H8104) — qal sequential perfect; opens the chain of consequence: keeping the charge is the condition for what follows.
• mishmarti ("my duty", H4931) — feminine singular noun in construct with the 1st-person suffix -i ("my"), naming the specific obligation to be kept.
• yis'u ("they will bear", H5375) — qal imperfect, paired with the negation lo' ("not", H3808): "they will not bear [sin]," describing an ongoing possibility rather than a completed act.
• yechallelu ("they will profane", H2490) — piel (intensive) imperfect; the piel stem marks an active, deliberate act of desecration, distinct from a simple qal action.
• mekaddesham ("the one sanctifying them", H6942) — piel participle in construct with the 3rd-person plural suffix -m ("them"); a participle expresses ongoing characteristic action, "the one who [continually] sanctifies."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of sequential perfects (ve.shameru … u.metu, "and they will keep … and they will die"), a common structural device linking cause and consequence: keeping the charge is set against the outcome of dying if it is not kept. Between these two perfects sit two imperfect clauses governed by negation and by the particle ki ("for/because", H3588): "they will not bear sin upon it" and "for they will profane it." The imperfect aspect marks these as open, recurring possibilities rather than single completed events, contrasting with the fixed sequential perfects that frame the passage.

Grammatically, several third-person masculine singular suffixes (-av, -o, -hu) recur across the verse, all referring back to the same antecedent — the object earlier called mishmarti, "my duty" — even though that noun is grammatically feminine. The text does not resolve this discrepancy; it simply continues the pronoun chain.

The final clause shifts to direct divine speech: ani YHWH mekaddesham, "I am Yehovah, [the] sanctifier of them," using a participle rather than a finite verb, which presents the sanctifying action as a continuous role rather than a single act.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders mishmarti ("my duty," singular) with the plural τὰ φυλάγματά μου ("my observances"), and consistently uses plural pronouns (αὐτά, αὐτούς) where the Hebrew uses singular suffixes. The Vulgate renders bo ("in it/by it", H9003+H9033) as "in sanctuario" ("in the sanctuary"), an addition not present in the Hebrew text, which only has a pronominal suffix without specifying "sanctuary."