Leviticus 4:24

Summary

The verse describes the offerer laying his hand on the head of the male goat and slaughtering it in the same location where the burnt offering is slaughtered, before Yehovah. The closing nominal clause identifies the goat as a chattat ("sin offering", H2403H).

Key words

• sa.Makh ("he will lean", H5564) — qal sequential perfect; continues the ritual sequence begun in the previous verse, describing the laying of the hand as an ongoing procedural action.
• ya.D ("hand", H3027G) — construct singular noun, bound to the following suffix "his," forming "his hand."
• sha.Chat ("he will cut [the] throat of", H7819A) — qal sequential perfect, parallel in form to samakh, marking the second act in the sequence (laying hand, then slaughtering).
• yish.Chat ("someone cuts [the] throat of", H7819A) — same root as shachat, but imperfect, used inside the relative clause to describe a general, repeated procedure ("where one slaughters") rather than a single completed act.
• cha.Tat ("[is] a sin offering", H2403H) — feminine singular noun functioning predicatively with hu ("it", H1931) to form a nominal (verbless) sentence classifying the animal.

What the text says

The verse is built on two parallel qal sequential perfects, samakh and shachat, both marked for "he" and both continuing the narrative chain begun with the vav-prefix (H9001). This grammatical parallelism ties the hand-laying and the slaughtering into one continuous ritual action performed by the same subject. The location of the slaughter is specified through a relative clause introduced by asher ("that/where", H0834A), which uses the imperfect yishchat rather than a perfect — this shift in aspect marks the clause as describing a standing practice or rule ("the place where [one] slaughters the burnt offering") rather than a one-time past event.

The final clause, chattat hu, has no verb: the noun chattat ("sin offering") and the pronoun hu ("it") stand side by side, a common Biblical Hebrew construction for classification or identification statements, functioning like "it is X."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the slaughtering verb as a plural, σφάξουσιν ("they will slaughter"), and also pluralizes the reference offering as τὰ ὁλοκαυτώματα ("the burnt offerings"), where the Hebrew has singular forms (shachat, "he will slaughter"; ha'olah, "the burnt offering"). The Vulgate follows the Hebrew singular pattern (immolaverit, holocaustum). For the closing clause, the LXX gives ἁμαρτία ἐστίν ("it is sin"), a more general term, where the Hebrew chattat specifically denotes the sin-offering category of sacrifice; the Vulgate's "quia pro peccato est" ("because it is for sin") similarly generalizes toward the underlying purpose rather than naming the offering type.