Leviticus 24:21

Summary

The verse states a legal principle of parallel consequences: one who strikes an animal must make restitution for it, while one who strikes a person is to be put to death. The two clauses mirror each other syntactically, using the same participial construction for the offender in each case.

Key words

• makeh ("[one who] strikes down", H5221) — hiphil participle in construct form, appearing twice; it names the agent as "the striker of X," a legal/case-style formula rather than a narrative description.
• behemah ("an animal", H0929) — feminine singular noun, the object struck in the first clause, picked up by the pronominal suffix on the following verb.
• yeshallemennah ("he will repay it", H7999A) — piel imperfect with 3rd feminine singular suffix ("her/it"), referring back grammatically to behemah; the piel stem intensifies the sense of full payment/restitution.
• adam ("a person", H0120G) — masculine singular noun, the object struck in the second clause, structurally parallel to behemah.
• yumat ("he will be put to death", H4191) — hophal imperfect, a causative-passive form: the subject undergoes the action of being caused to die, without naming who causes it.

What the text says

The Hebrew builds two clauses on an identical template: a construct participle makeh ("striker of...") followed by its object (behemah or adam), then a finite imperfect verb stating the consequence. This construction functions like a casuistic legal formula — "the one who strikes X" — rather than a narrated event. The parallelism is reinforced by the shared verb form makeh opening both halves, so the grammatical symmetry itself communicates that the two cases are being set side by side for comparison.

The verbal stems mark a further contrast: yeshallemennah is piel (active, intensive), placing the responsibility for repayment explicitly on the striker, with the suffix -nah ("it/her") tying the payment back to the animal. By contrast, yumat is hophal, a passive causative — the text does not say who puts the striker to death, only that the death is caused to happen to him. This shift from active-transitive to passive-causative is a grammatical feature not preserved in translations that render both clauses with similar active-voice English ("must make restitution... must be put to death").

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (Qui percusserit jumentum, reddet aliud... Qui percusserit hominem, punietur) preserves the Hebrew's two-part parallel structure closely. The LXX text provided here, however, contains only a single clause concerning a man ("ὃς πατάξῃ ἄνθρωπον, καὶ ἀποθάνῃ, θανάτῳ θανατούσθω" — "whoever strikes a man, and he dies, let him be put to death by death"), lacking the animal-restitution clause found in the Hebrew and Vulgate, and using a doubled construction (dative noun + verb, "by death be put to death") where the Hebrew has the single hophal form yumat.