Leviticus 24:11

Summary

The verse narrates that the son of an Israelite woman spoke against or cursed "the Name" during a conflict, and was brought before Moses for judgment. It then identifies him through his mother's genealogy: Shelomith daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan.

Key words

• yikko ("he pierced/pronounced," H5344A) — qal narrative verb from a root meaning "to bore, pierce, specify precisely"; here it describes an act done to ha-Shem ("the Name"), though the exact nuance (utter precisely vs. blaspheme) is not fixed by the verb itself.
• ha-Shem ("the Name," H8034) — masculine singular noun with definite article, the direct object of both yikko and yekallel.
• yekallel ("he cursed," H7043) — piel (intensive) narrative verb, a second, distinct action following yikko, giving the sentence two paired verbs describing what was done to "the Name."
• yaviu ("they brought," H0935P) — hiphil (causative) plural narrative verb; the subject is unspecified ("people brought him"), an impersonal plural construction.
• bat-Divri ("daughter of Dibri," H1323G construct) — construct chain identifying Shelomith by her father, itself embedded in the larger genealogical clause naming her tribe, Dan (H1835G).

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a double-verb construction: yikko ... ha-Shem ... yekallel — literally "he pierced/pronounced the Name, and he cursed." The two narrative verbs (vav-consecutive forms) present two sequential actions performed on the same object, "the Name," without the text itself specifying whether the first verb denotes simply uttering the Name aloud or an act of blasphemy; the second verb, in the piel stem, intensifies the action as "cursing." The subject throughout is ben-ha-ishah ha-Yisre'elit ("the son of the woman, the Israelite"), a construct phrase where both the head noun and the following noun carry the definite article, a pattern that marks apposition ("the woman, the Israelite one").

The clause "they brought him to Moses" uses an impersonal plural verb (yaviu), common in Hebrew narrative for unspecified agents ("people brought him"). The final clause shifts to background information via a nominal (non-verbal) sentence, "and the name of his mother [was] Shelomith," using construct chains (shem immo, "name of his mother"; bat-Divri, "daughter of Dibri") to anchor her identity within a three-generation genealogy ending in the tribal affiliation le-matteh Dan ("of the tribe of Dan").

Differences between versions

The LXX reads a plural object, "they brought them (αὐτοὺς) to Moses," where the Hebrew has the singular oto ("him"). The LXX also merges the two Hebrew verbs differently, rendering the action as "having named the name, he cursed," collapsing yikko and yekallel into a single sequence framed around "naming" rather than two independent narrative verbs. The Vulgate preserves two verbs ("blasphemasset... maledixisset") but casts them in a subordinate "cum" clause, altering the sentence's syntactic prominence compared to the Hebrew's paired main-clause narrative verbs.