Leviticus 23:14

Summary

The verse prohibits eating bread, roasted grain, or new grain from the harvest until a specific day — the day on which an offering is brought to God. It closes by stating this rule as a permanent statute for all future generations, wherever they live.

Key words

• qali ("roasted grain", H7039) — a masculine singular noun naming one of the three forbidden food forms, referring to grain parched by fire.
• karmel ("new corn", H3759) — masculine singular noun for fresh/green grain, distinct from processed lechem ("bread", H3899).
• to’khelu ("you will eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural; the imperfect with the preceding negation lo ("not", H3808) forms a durative prohibition, not a single-instance command.
• ‘etzem ("[the] substance of", H6106) — feminine singular construct; in construct with hayom hazeh ("this day") it forms an idiom marking a precise point in time, literally "the bone/substance of this day."
• ha’vi’a- ("bring", H0935) — hiphil infinitive with pronominal suffix -khem ("you", H9046); the causative infinitive construct functions as a temporal clause, "until your bringing," setting the moment the prohibition ends.

What the text says

The sentence opens with three coordinated nouns — lechem ("bread"), qali ("roasted grain"), karmel ("new corn") — all governed by a single negated verb, lo to’khelu ("you will not eat"), so the prohibition covers all three forms of the new harvest equally. The imperfect verb form indicates an ongoing restriction rather than a one-time act, extended by two successive ‘ad ("until", H5704) clauses that mark the temporal boundary: first ‘ad ‘etzem hayom hazeh ("until this very day"), then ‘ad havi’akhem ("until your bringing"), the infinitive construct with suffix functioning as a subordinate temporal clause dependent on the community's own action of bringing the offering.

The final clause shifts from prohibition to legal status: a chain of construct nouns — chukat ‘olam ("a statute of perpetuity"), le-doroteikhem ("to your generations"), be-khol moshvoteikhem ("in all your dwelling places") — stacks genitive relationships to specify that the rule applies across time (generations) and space (all settlements), without a finite verb, characteristic of Hebrew legal formulas.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders karmel as "νέα" ("new [grain]"), an interpretive gloss rather than a direct lexical equivalent. It also pluralizes the offering as "τὰ δῶρα" ("the gifts") where the Hebrew korban ("present of", H7133) is singular in construct with ’Elohei-khem ("your God"). The Vulgate adds "ex segete" ("from the standing grain"), a phrase with no direct counterpart in the Hebrew construct chain, and renders the ‘etzem hayom hazeh idiom simply as "usque ad diem qua" ("until the day on which"), losing the emphatic "substance/very" nuance carried by ‘etzem.