Leviticus 23:41

Summary

Leviticus 23:41 instructs that a seven-day festival be celebrated for Yehovah once a year, designates this as a permanent statute for future generations, and specifies that it occurs in the seventh month.

Key words

• chagoTem ("you will celebrate a festival", H2287) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative sequence of commands; the same root appears again at the verse's end in imperfect form.
• chag ("a festival", H2282) — masculine singular noun, the object of the celebration, paired with laYHWH ("to/for Yehovah") to specify for whom the festival is held.
• shiv'At yaMim ("seven of days", H7651 + H3117) — cardinal number in construct with "days," giving the festival's fixed duration.
• chuKat oLam ("a statute of perpetuity", H2708 + H5769) — construct chain marking this observance as an enduring legal statute, not a one-time event.
• doroTeichem ("generations of you", H1755 + H9026) — plural construct noun with second-person plural suffix, extending the statute's applicability across successive generations.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative vav attached to chagoTem ("and you will celebrate"), a qal sequential perfect that continues a chain of instructions from the preceding verses. The object marker 'oto ("it," H0853+H9033) points back to the festival introduced earlier, followed by chag laYHWH ("a festival for Yehovah"), which restates the purpose of the celebration. The phrase shiv'At yamim bashanah ("seven days in the year") fixes both the duration (seven days) and frequency (once yearly) using a construct number-noun pair.

The second half of the verse shifts from narrative perfect to legal formula: chuqqat 'olam ledorotechem ("a statute of perpetuity for your generations") uses two stacked construct chains — "statute of perpetuity" and "generations of you" — to frame the observance as binding across time rather than a single historical instance. The verse closes by specifying timing: bachodesh hashevi'i tachoggu 'oto ("in the seventh month you will celebrate it"), where tachoggu switches to imperfect aspect, indicating ongoing or repeated future action, distinct from the sequential perfect used earlier for the same verbal root chagag (H2287).

Differences between versions

The LXX given here begins mid-verse with nomimon aiōnion ("perpetual law"), omitting the LXX's rendering of the initial clause about the seven-day festival (not shown in the provided LXX text segment). The Vulgate renders chuqqat 'olam as "legitimum sempiternum erit" ("it will be a perpetual statute"), adding the verb "erit" ("will be") not explicitly present in the Hebrew construct chain, which lacks a copula. The Hebrew tachoggu (imperfect, "you will celebrate") corresponds to the LXX's heortasete (future active) and the Vulgate's "celebrabitis" (future), all conveying future/ongoing aspect despite differing verbal systems.