Leviticus 5:1

Summary

Leviticus 5:1 describes the case of a person (nefesh) who sins by hearing a public oath or adjuration related to testimony, having personally witnessed or known something, and who fails to speak up. The verse states that such a person will bear responsibility for that failure.

Key words

• Nefesh ("anyone", H5315J) — feminine singular noun, here functioning as a legal-generic subject ("a person," "a soul") that governs the feminine verb forms that follow.
• techeta' ("it will sin", H2398) — qal imperfect, third feminine singular, agreeing with nefesh; introduces the conditional scenario with the particle ki ("if/when").
• qol ("sound of", H6963K) — masculine singular construct, forming a bound phrase with alah ("an oath", H0423): literally "the voice/sound of an oath," meaning a public adjuration or curse-formula addressed to potential witnesses.
• yaggid ("he will tell", H5046) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, third masculine singular; the causative stem marks the act of "causing to be known," i.e., testifying or reporting.
• nasa' ("he will bear", H5375J) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by the preceding verbs; paired with avono ("his iniquity", H5771G construct + suffix H9023), producing the idiom "bear his iniquity," denoting the consequence for silence.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of conditional and sequential verb forms typical of Hebrew case law (casuistic) style. It opens with ve-nefesh ki techeta' ("and a person, if/when it sins"), using the imperfect to set up a hypothetical situation. The narrative continues with sequential perfects (ve-shame'ah, "and it will hear") that logically follow from the initial condition, describing the person hearing qol alah, "the sound/voice of an oath" — a construct phrase indicating a public call for testimony or a curse invoked on those who withhold knowledge.

The text then specifies that the subject shifts grammatically to masculine forms (hu edh, "he [was] a witness"; ra'ah, "he saw"; yada', "he knew"), listing two ways of having relevant knowledge — direct sight or acquired knowledge — joined by o ("or", H0176A) in both cases. The conditional im-lo yaggid ("if he will not tell") uses the negated hiphil imperfect to describe the withholding of testimony. The consequence is expressed with the sequential perfect nasa' avono, "he will bear his iniquity," a fixed idiom in the construct chain of avon ("iniquity", H5771G) plus the third-person suffix -o ("his", H9023).

The alternation between feminine (nefesh, techeta', shame'ah) and masculine (hu, ra'ah, yada', yaggid, nasa') grammatical forms shows the generic subject nefesh being resolved into a masculine individual as the scenario unfolds — a common feature in Hebrew legal prose where a grammatically feminine collective noun stands for a person of unspecified sex.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders qol alah ("sound of an oath") as φωνὴν ὁρκισμοῦ ("voice of an oath/adjuration"), closely matching the Hebrew construct. The Vulgate's vocem jurantis ("the voice of one swearing") shifts the phrase toward describing a person swearing rather than the oath-sound itself, as reflected also in RV1909's "la voz del que juró" ("the voice of the one who swore"). The BSB paraphrases the entire clause as "failing to testify when he hears a public charge," reorganizing the sequence of hearing, witnessing, and telling found in the Hebrew's chain of perfects and imperfects.