Leviticus 4:22

Summary

The verse opens a legal case regarding a nasi ("leader", H5387A) who sins unintentionally by violating one of the commandments of Yehovah his God. The Hebrew specifies that the violation occurs through shegagah ("inadvertence", H7684), and the clause concludes that such a person incurs guilt.

Key words

• nasi ("a leader", H5387A) — masculine singular noun identifying the social/political status of the offender, distinguishing this case from the priest (v.3) or the whole community (v.13) treated earlier in the chapter.
• yechetaʾ ("he will sin", H2398) — qal imperfect, marking the sin as a hypothetical/future case governed by the relative particle 'asher ("that", H0834A), setting up the conditional legal scenario.
• te'aseinah ("they will be done", H6213A) — niphal imperfect feminine plural, agreeing with mitzvot ("commandments of", H4687), a feminine plural noun; the passive form shifts focus from the agent to the commandments themselves as things "not to be done."
• shegagah ("inadvertence", H7684) — feminine singular noun preceded by the preposition bi ("by", H9003), specifying the manner of the violation as unintentional, a technical term in Levitical sacrificial law.
• 'ashem ("he will be guilty", H0816) — qal sequential perfect, closing the conditional chain with the legal consequence: the state of guilt that results from the preceding actions.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential verb forms typical of Hebrew casuistic (case) law: an initial imperfect (yechetaʾ) sets the hypothetical condition ("if/when a leader sins"), followed by a sequential perfect ('asah, "he will do") that continues the same hypothetical timeframe, and closes with another sequential perfect ('ashem, "he will be guilty") stating the outcome. This verb chain — imperfect followed by two sequential perfects — is a common syntactic pattern in Levitical legislation for describing a scenario and its consequence.

The relative clause 'asher lo'-te'aseinah ("which shall not be done") uses a niphal (passive-reflexive) verb agreeing in gender and number with mitzvot ("commandments"), so the commandments themselves are grammatically the subject of "not being done," rather than the leader being the subject of "not doing." The phrase bishgagah ("by inadvertence") specifies the legal category of the offense — unintentional rather than deliberate.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew 'elohav ("his God", H0430G with 3ms suffix) refers to the leader's God in the singular. The LXX renders this as αὐτῶν ("their"), a plural possessive, shifting the referent from the individual leader to a group.