Leviticus 24:15

Summary

Leviticus 24:15 instructs Moses to relay a law to the Israelites: any person who curses God will bear the consequences of that sin. The verse introduces the case with a doubled distributive expression and closes with a formula of personal liability.

Key words

• ish ish ("a person, a person", H0376G, repeated) — the doubling of the masculine singular noun functions distributively, meaning "each and every person" or "whoever," a repetition not reproduced by a single word in translation.
• yekaLel ("he will curse", H7043) — piel imperfect, intensive stem, marking the verb as expressing a deliberate, forceful act of cursing rather than a casual one.
• Elohav ("his God", H0430G) — masculine plural construct with a pronominal suffix; the plural form functions here as the standard term for God with singular reference, followed by the possessive "his."
• naSa' ("he will bear", H5375J) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative sequence begun by the conditional clause; it expresses the resulting consequence of the prior action.
• chet'o ("his sin", H2399) — construct noun with suffix, forming the object that is "borne," i.e., the sin/guilt is what the offender carries.

What the text says

The verse opens with a narrative instruction, te.da.Ber ("you will speak," H1696G), addressed to Moses regarding bene Yisra'El ("the people of Israel," H1121G/H3478), introduced by le'mor ("saying," H0559), a standard formula marking direct speech to follow. The legal case itself begins with the doubled ish ish, a construction that shifts the statement from a specific individual to a general, distributive class — "any person whatsoever." The condition is introduced by ki ("if," H3588A), followed by the piel imperfect yekaLel, which intensifies the act of cursing beyond a simple utterance. The object of the curse is Elohav, using the plural construct form with the third-person suffix "his," attached to the divine referent. The apodosis is joined by a narrative vav (H9001) prefixed to the qal sequential perfect naSa', producing the sense "and he will bear," which carries forward the logical result of the protasis. The final phrase, chet'o, uses the construct form with suffix to specify what is borne: his own sin.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate both render the doubled Hebrew ish ish with a single term — Greek ánthropos and Latin Homo — losing the distributive repetition present in the Hebrew. The LXX also renders Elohav ("his God") simply as theón ("God"), without the possessive suffix, while the Vulgate's Deo suo ("his God") and the Hebrew both preserve the possessive form.