Leviticus 24:14

Summary

YHWH instructs Moses to bring the man who cursed outside the camp, so that those who heard him lay their hands on his head, and the whole congregation stone him. The verse gives a three-step procedure using an initial imperative followed by two sequential actions.

Key words

• ho.Tze' ("bring out", H3318H) — hiphil (causative) imperative: a direct command to cause the person to go out, not a request.
• m.ka.Lel ("[one who] cursed", H7043) — piel (intensive) participle with the definite article: names the offender by his ongoing/completed action, "the one who curses/cursed," rather than a fixed title.
• sa.me.Khu ("they will lean", H5564) — qal sequential perfect: grammatically continues the initial imperative as the next required step in the sequence, though it does not itself carry imperative morphology.
• rag.Mu ("they will stone", H7275) — qal sequential perfect: the final action in the chain, again formally a perfect verb functioning to continue the command sequence.
• 'e.Dah ("congregation", H5712) — feminine singular noun: identifies the collective body performing the final act.

What the text says

The verse opens with a hiphil imperative, ho.Tze' ("bring out"), addressed to a singular "you," commanding that ha-m.ka.Lel ("the one who cursed") be taken 'el-mi.chutz la.ma.cha.neh ("to outside the camp"). The object of the command is marked by the article plus a piel participle, a form that describes the person through the action he performed rather than a fixed noun for "criminal" or "blasphemer."

After this imperative, the sentence shifts to two verbs in the vav-conjunctive plus perfect construction (ve.sa.me.khu and ve.rag.mu), a common Hebrew mechanism where a perfect verb prefixed with vav continues a preceding command as a sequence of resulting or subsequent actions. Grammatically these are perfect-tense forms, but their function here is to extend the imperative force of the first verb into two further stages: those who heard (ha.sho.me.'im, qal participle, "the ones hearing/who heard") place their hands on his head, and then kol-ha-'e.dah ("all the congregation") carries out the stoning. The construct chains (kol..., rosh-o, yedei-hem) tie each action to its specific subject and object economically, a feature not always visible in translation.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew participle m.ka.Lel ("[one] cursing/cursed") is rendered in the LXX as κατάρασά. μένον and in the Vulgate as blasphemum ("blasphemer"), both narrowing the sense toward a specific offense (blasphemy) rather than the more general verbal root "to curse" reflected in the Hebrew H7043. The SBLIBRE Spanish translation adds "mi nombre" ("my name") after "maldijo," a specification not present in the Hebrew word-by-word data given here.