Leviticus 4:34

Summary

The verse describes a priestly action with the blood of a chataT ("sin offering", H2403H): the priest takes some blood with his finger and applies it to the horns of the altar of burnt offering, then pours out the remainder of the blood at the base of the altar.

Key words

• la.Kach ("he will take", H3947G) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain of ritual actions begun earlier in the chapter.
• cha.taT ("sin offering", H2403H) — feminine singular noun, definite by the article ha.; identifies the specific offering whose blood is manipulated.
• na.Tan ("he will put [it]", H5414H) — qal sequential perfect; parallel in form to la.Kach, marking the second step of the sequence (taking, then placing).
• kar.Not ("[the] horns of", H7161A) — feminine plural construct; grammatically bound to miz.Bach ("altar of", H4196), forming "horns of the altar."
• yish.Pokh ("he will pour out", H8210G) — qal imperfect, distinct in form from the two preceding sequential perfects; marks the final disposal action for the remaining blood.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four verbal actions joined by the narrative ve. ("and", H9001/H9002): taking (la.Kach), placing (na.Tan), and pouring (yish.Pokh), with the object marker 'Et (H0853) introducing the final direct object, kol- da.Ma-h ("all its blood", H3605/H1818/H9024). The first two verbs, la.Kach and na.Tan, are qal sequential perfects, a form that continues a narrative sequence begun earlier in the chapter's instructions; the final verb, yish.Pokh, shifts to an imperfect form, which in this legal-ritual context still functions as a continuation of the sequence but is grammatically distinguished from the preceding two.

The construct chains are notable: dam ha.chataT ("blood of the sin offering") and kar.Not miz.Bach ha.'olah ("horns of the altar of the burnt offering") stack multiple nouns in construct relationships, a common feature of Hebrew ritual prose that produces long compound phrases translated in English or Spanish with several "of" phrases. The suffix -o on 'etzba'-o ("his finger", H0676+H9023) and the suffix -ah on dam-ah ("its blood", H1818+H9024) both mark possession pronominally rather than through separate possessive words.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the second action with ἐπιθήσει ("he will place/put"), matching na.Tan, but structures the sentence with a participle (λαβὼν, "having taken") rather than a finite sequential verb for la.Kach, reflecting a different syntactic strategy for chaining actions. The Vulgate similarly uses a participial-style construction (sumetque... et tangens, "and he will take... and touching"), introducing "touching" (tangens) for the horn-application rather than a direct equivalent of "put/place," a divergence in how the placement action is expressed compared to the Hebrew na.Tan ("he will put").