Leviticus 23:38

Summary

Leviticus 23:38 closes the list of festival prescriptions by clarifying that the offerings just described for the appointed feasts come in addition to four other categories of offerings owed to Yehovah: the sabbaths, personal gifts, vows, and freewill offerings.

Key words

• mi-le-Vad ("besides", H9006+H9005+H0905J) — a compound preposition built from min ("from") + le ("to") + bad ("separation/apart"), repeated four times to mean "apart from, in addition to." It structures the entire verse as a list of exclusions/additions.
• shabbeTot ("sabbaths of", H7676) — feminine plural construct, linked to Yehovah (H3068G), naming the recurring weekly observances as a distinct category from the annual feasts discussed earlier in the chapter.
• mattenoteiKhem ("your gifts", H4979 + H9026) — feminine plural construct with 2nd person masculine plural suffix, denoting offerings belonging to or given by "you" (plural addressees).
• nidreiKhem ("your vows", H5088 + H9026) — masculine plural construct with the same suffix, referring to obligations undertaken by vow.
• nidvoteiKhem ("your freewill offerings", H5071 + H9026) — feminine plural construct with suffix, referring to offerings given voluntarily, not from a specific vow.
• titteNu ("you will give", H5414G) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, expressing an ongoing or future action: the people's continued act of giving these offerings to Yehovah.

What the text says

The verse is built almost entirely through the repeated construct chain mi-le-Vad... X ("besides/apart from... X"), occurring four times, each introducing a different class of offering: the shabbeTot ("sabbaths") of Yehovah, "your" mattenoteiKhem ("gifts"), "your" nidreiKhem ("vows"), and "your" nidvoteiKhem ("freewill offerings"). Each of these nouns appears in construct form, meaning they are grammatically bound to what follows — either to Yehovah directly (in the case of the sabbaths) or to the pronominal suffix -Khem ("your," masculine plural), which ties the gifts, vows, and freewill offerings to the addressees of the text.

The final clause, introduced by the relative particle 'aSher ("which", H0834A), attaches a verbal action to the freewill offerings: titteNu ("you will give"), a qal imperfect verb indicating an action that is ongoing or anticipated — the offerings "which you will give" to Yehovah (repeated with the preposition la-, "to"). This construction distinguishes categories of religious giving (recurring calendrical sabbaths versus personal gifts, vows, and voluntary offerings) that stand outside the specific festival calendar detailed in the preceding verses of the chapter.