Leviticus 24:20

Summary

The verse states the principle of equivalent retribution: a fracture for a fracture, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The final clause specifies that whatever blemish a person inflicts on another will be inflicted back on him, using a grammatical shift from active to passive voice.

Key words

• She.ver ("a fracture", H7667) — masculine singular noun, repeated twice, joined by Ta.chat to form the pattern "X for X."
• Ta.chat ("for", H8478H) — construct noun functioning as a preposition meaning "in place of," linking each pair of matching body-part/injury terms.
• yi.Ten ("he will make", H5414G) — qal (active) imperfect of the verb natan, describing the action of the one who inflicts the blemish.
• mum ("a blemish", H3971B) — masculine singular noun naming the general category of injury that subsumes the specific examples (fracture, eye, tooth).
• yi.Na.ten ("it will be made", H5414G) — niphal (passive) imperfect of the same root as yi.Ten, describing the reciprocal action done to the offender.

What the text says

The verse opens with three parallel phrases built on the same syntactic template: noun + Ta.chat ("for") + the same noun repeated — She.ver Ta.chat She.ver, 'A.yin Ta.chat 'A.yin, Shen Ta.chat Shen. This construction has no main verb; it functions as a list of equivalences, each pair naming an identical type of injury (fracture, eye, tooth) on both sides of Ta.chat.

The second half of the verse generalizes this list with a ka'asher...ken ("just as... so") comparative structure. The clause ka'asher yiTen mum ba'Adam uses the qal (active) verb yiTen, with an unspecified subject ("he") as the one who causes the mum ("blemish") ba'Adam ("on the person" — the article H9003 marks 'Adam as a specific, already-referenced individual, i.e., "the other person"). The corresponding clause, ken yiNaten bo, shifts to the niphal (passive) form yiNaten, built on the same root H5414 as yiTen. This voice change removes the grammatical subject: no agent is named for who carries out the corresponding action. The pronominal suffix o ("him", H9033) attached to the preposition indicates that the passive action falls back on the one who caused the injury.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text is structured as a bare list of equivalences (noun Ta.chat noun) with no verb in the first half, followed by an active/passive verbal contrast (yiTen/yiNaten) in the second half. The LXX (Swete) mirrors this structure with ἀντὶ ("instead of") between paired nouns, and renders the active/passive contrast with δῷ (active subjunctive) and δοθήσεται (future passive), preserving the same voice shift as the Hebrew. The Vulgate (Clementine) diverges by supplying an explicit verb, restituet ("he shall restore"), for the entire first list, and rendering the second clause with sustinere cogetur ("he will be forced to endure"), which introduces the notion of compulsion not lexically present in the Hebrew niphal yiNaten, though the Vulgate's passive construction still corresponds to the Hebrew's passive voice.