Leviticus 4:27

Summary

Leviticus 4:27 opens the law concerning an individual from among the common people who sins unintentionally by violating one of the commandments of Yehovah (H3068G). The verse specifies the identity of the offender, the inadvertent nature of the sin, and states the consequence: he incurs guilt.

Key words

• nefesh ("a person", H5315J) — feminine singular construct; literally "soul," used here as the general term for an individual, in construct with achat ("one").
• techeta ("it will sin", H2398) — qal imperfect, third feminine singular (agreeing with nefesh), denoting a potential or future act of sinning.
• bishgagah ("by inadvertence", H7684) — feminine singular noun with prefixed preposition, characterizing the sin as unintentional rather than deliberate.
• ba'asotah ("when she does it", H6213A) — qal infinitive construct with pronominal suffix "her," creating a temporal clause ("in her doing") that specifies the circumstance of the transgression.
• te'aseinah ("they will be done", H6213A) — niphal (passive) imperfect, third feminine plural, referring back to the commandments (mitzvot) that "are not to be done."
• ashem ("he will be guilty", H0816) — qal sequential perfect, third masculine singular, functioning as the main consequence clause after the conditional protasis.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a conditional (ve'im) construction: the protasis extends from nefesh achat through the relative clause asher lo-te'aseinah ("which are not to be done"), and the apodosis is the single verb ve'ashem ("and he will be guilty"), connected by a narrative vav that continues the sequence rather than introducing a new independent clause. The grammatical subject nefesh is feminine, and the verbs agreeing with it (techeta, ba'asotah) are also feminine, even though the sequential perfect ashem at the end shifts to masculine — a common pattern in Biblical Hebrew where the general/generic pronoun defaults to masculine despite a feminine grammatical antecedent.

The phrase me'am ha'aretz ("from the people of the land", H5971A + H0776H) restricts the referent to a person from the general population, in construct with the definite article on aretz. The commandments violated are described through a relative clause using the niphal form te'aseinah, which frames the commandments passively as things "not to be done," rather than actively prohibiting an action — a subtle grammatical distinction that emphasizes the prohibited status of the acts themselves.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew ve'ashem ("and he will be guilty", H0816) is rendered in the LXX as καὶ λήσῃ ("and he escapes notice" or "is unaware"), a divergence in meaning: the Hebrew verb expresses incurred guilt, while the Greek verb relates to unawareness. The Vulgate's atque delinquat ("and he transgresses/offends") aligns more closely with the Hebrew sense of guilt or wrongdoing than the LXX phrasing does.