Leviticus 5:12

Summary

The verse describes the ritual procedure for a sin offering: the offerer brings the offering to the priest, who takes a full handful of it as a memorial portion, burns it on the altar together with the fire offerings to Yehovah, and the text closes by identifying the offering as a chattat ("sin offering", H2403H).

Key words

• he.vi.'A ("he will bring", H0935P) — hiphil causative, sequential perfect, third person masculine; the causative stem marks that the subject causes the offering to be brought, not merely goes himself.
• ka.Matz ("he will take a handful", H7061) — qal sequential perfect; a specific verb denoting the act of grasping a quantity with the closed hand, tied to the noun kum.Tz ("handful", H7062) in the same clause.
• me.Lo' ("[the] fullness of", H4393) — construct noun, linking to kum.Tz ("handful") to form the phrase "the fullness of his handful," emphasizing that the amount taken fills the hand completely.
• 'az.ka.ra.Ta ("memorial offering", H0234) — feminine singular noun with pronominal suffix "its," naming the portion burned as a token/remembrance offering.
• hik.Tir ("he will make [it] smoke", H6999A) — hiphil sequential perfect, the technical verb for causing an offering to go up in smoke on the altar, distinct from ordinary burning.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ve- + perfect), a common narrative pattern in legal/ritual instruction texts: "and he will bring... and he will take a handful... and he will make it smoke." Each verb carries the vav that continues the sequence begun in the preceding verses, giving the passage a procedural, step-by-step character rather than a simple narrative.

The syntax places the priest (ko.Hen, H3548) as the acting subject of the central verbs ka.Matz ("he will take a handful") and hik.Tir ("he will make [it] smoke"), while the offerer is the implied subject of he.vi.'A ("he will bring"). The construct chain me.Lo' kum.Tzo ("the fullness of his handful") is a fixed idiom specifying the exact measure taken — a full hand, not an approximate portion. The object marked by 'et- (H0853, untranslated object marker) is 'az.ka.ra.Tah ("its memorial offering"), the portion singled out to be burned, distinguishing it from the remainder of the offering material not consumed on the altar. The final clause, chatTat hi' ("it [is] a sin offering"), uses the independent pronoun hi' (H1931, "she/it") as a copula-like predicate nominative, formally classifying the entire preceding ritual action under the category of chattat.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the altar destination as "τὸ θυσιαστήριον τῶν ὁλοκαυτωμάτων" ("the altar of the whole burnt offerings"), adding a specification not present in the Hebrew, which simply reads ha-mizBecha ("the altar", H4196) followed by 'al 'ishei Yehovah ("upon the fire offerings of Yehovah"). The Vulgate's "in monimentum ejus qui obtulerit" ("as a memorial of him who offered it") expands the concise Hebrew 'az.ka.ra.Tah ("its memorial offering") by explicitly naming the offerer, an interpretive addition not found in the Hebrew noun alone.