Leviticus 27:14

Summary

Leviticus 27:14 addresses a case in which a person dedicates his house as something holy to Yehovah. The priest is instructed to assess its value, whether good or bad, and the assessed price stands as final.

Key words

• yak.Dish ("he will set apart as holy", H6942H) — hiphil imperfect, causative: the subject actively causes the house to become holy, rather than simply being holy itself.
• bei.T ("house", H1004B) — masculine singular construct, bound to the following suffix o ("his"), producing "his house" as the object of consecration.
• he.'e.ri.Kh ("he will evaluate", H6186B) — hiphil sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative sequence after the conditional clause; marks the priest's act of valuation as the next step in the process.
• ya.'a.Rikh ("he will evaluate", H6186B) — same root as above but in imperfect form, used in the relative clause "as he will evaluate," expressing the general or repeated nature of the priestly assessment.
• ya.Kum ("it will stand", H6965I) — qal imperfect of the verb "to stand/arise," here conveying that the priest's valuation becomes fixed or binding.

What the text says

The verse opens with a casuistic construction typical of legal material: ve-'Ish ki ("and a man if," H0376I + H3588A), introducing a conditional scenario. The protasis states that a man "will set apart as holy" (yak.Dish, H6942H) "his house" (bei.T-o, H1004B + H9023) "to Yehovah" (la-Yehovah, H9005 + H3068G). The hiphil form of yak.Dish indicates that the action produces a change of status — the house becomes holy through the man's declaration, rather than the man discovering it to be holy.

The apodosis begins with the narrative vav on ve-he.'e.ri.Kh (H9001 + H6186B), a sequential perfect that moves the action forward: "and the priest will evaluate it." The evaluation is qualified by the phrase bein tov u-bein ra' ("between good and between bad," H0996G + H2896A + H7451A), a merism expressing the full range of possible conditions the house might be in, not a moral judgment.

The final clause repeats the root '-r-kh ("to evaluate") in the imperfect form ya.'a.Rikh (H6186B) within a relative clause introduced by ka'asher ("just as," H9004 + H0834D), reinforcing that whatever value the priest assigns is the operative one. The closing verb ya.Kum ("it will stand," H6965I) — qal imperfect of the root "to arise/stand" — conveys that the priest's determination becomes fixed and authoritative once pronounced.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew bein tov u-bein ra' ("between good and between bad") is rendered by the LXX as ἀνὰ μέσον καλῆς καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον πονηρᾶς ("between good and between bad/evil"), closely matching the Hebrew merism. The Vulgate paraphrases this as utrum bona an mala sit ("whether it is good or bad"), preserving the sense but using an indirect question rather than the "between...and" structure of the Hebrew and Greek.