Leviticus 4:18

Summary

The verse describes the second half of a purification-offering ritual: the officiant places some of the blood on the horns of an altar located before Yehovah in the Tent of Meeting, then pours the remaining blood at the base of the altar of burnt offering, which stands at the entrance of that same tent.

Key words

• yiTen ("he will put", H5414H) — qal imperfect, third person masculine singular; denotes a deliberate future/ongoing action of placing blood on specific points of the altar.
• qarNot ("horns of", H7161A) — feminine plural construct; grammatically bound to hammizBeach ("the altar"), indicating the horns as a defined part belonging to the altar structure.
• yishPokh ("he will pour out", H8210G) — qal imperfect, parallel in form to yiTen, marking the second and final action with the remaining blood.
• yeSod ("base of", H3247H) — masculine singular construct, bound to mizBach ("altar of"), specifying the location at the foot of the altar where blood is poured.
• Pentach ("entrance of", H6607) — masculine singular construct, bound to Ohel ("tent of"), locating the altar of burnt offering relative to the Tent of Meeting's opening.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides the blood-handling procedure into two parallel clauses, each built on a qal imperfect verb (yiTen, "he will put"; yishPokh, "he will pour out") governing a partitive or totalizing object. The first clause uses the partitive construction min-haDam ("some of the blood") as object of yiTen, followed by the phrase 'al-qarNot hammizBeach ("on the horns of the altar"), itself further specified by two successive relative clauses introduced by 'aSher ("which"): the altar is "before Yehovah" (lifNei Yehovah) and "in the Tent of Meeting" (be'Ohel mo'Ed). This double relative clause narrows down which altar is meant without naming it directly beyond hammizBeach ("the altar").

The second clause shifts to totality: 'et kol-haDam ("all the blood") as direct object (marked by 'Et, H0853) of yishPokh, directed 'el-yeSod mizBach ha'oLah ("to the base of the altar of the burnt offering"). This altar is distinguished from the first by the added noun ha'oLah ("the burnt offering") and by its own relative clause locating it at Petach 'Ohel mo'Ed ("the entrance of the Tent of Meeting"). The repeated construct chains (qarNot... hammizBeach, yeSod mizBach... ha'oLah) and the twin relative clauses create a syntactic parallelism that in Hebrew clearly separates two distinct altars by location — one "before Yehovah" inside the tent structure, the other at its entrance — a distinction the flat English gloss "altar" in both clauses can obscure without attention to the construct phrases.

Differences between versions

The LXX specifies the first altar as τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου τῶν θυμιαμάτων τῆς συνθέσεως ("the altar of the incense of composition"), a descriptive expansion not present in the Hebrew, which simply reads hammizBeach ("the altar") qualified only by the relative clauses "before Yehovah" and "in the Tent of Meeting." The LXX also inserts ὁ ἱερεὺς ("the priest") as explicit subject of the verb, where the Hebrew leaves the subject implicit in the verb form yiTen. The Vulgate follows the Hebrew more closely, rendering the first altar simply as altaris without the incense qualifier, matching the unspecified hammizBeach of the Hebrew text.