Leviticus 5:9

Summary

The verse describes the ritual manipulation of blood from a chattat ("sin offering") in a specific sacrificial procedure: part of the blood is sprinkled on the side of the altar, and the remainder is drained at its base. The closing phrase identifies the offering by name.

Key words

• hiZah ("he will spatter", H5137A) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect, indicating the priest causes the blood to be thrown/sprinkled; the sequential form links this action to a prior step in the ritual sequence.
• chaTat ("sin offering", H2403H) — feminine singular noun, appearing twice (once construct as ha-chaTat, once absolute as chaTat), naming the offering both as source of blood and as final classification of the whole rite.
• nish'Ar ("remainder", H7604) — niphal participle, masculine singular, functioning as a substantive ("the thing remaining"); the niphal stem marks the blood as the entity that "remains" without an explicit agent causing the remaining.
• yimmaTzeh ("it will be drained out", H4680) — niphal imperfect, again passive/reflexive in form, so the text does not specify who performs the draining; the action simply happens to the blood.
• yeSod ("base of", H3247H) — construct singular noun, syntactically bound to ha-mizBeach ("the altar"), marking the lower structural point of the altar as destination.

What the text says

The verse is built as two parallel clauses describing the disposal of the blood, joined by the conjunction ve ("and", H9002). In the first clause, the subject (the priest, understood from context) performs an active causative action: hiZah ("he will spatter"), governing the phrase mi-dam ha-chaTat ("some of the blood of the sin offering") and directing it 'al qir ha-mizBeach ("on the side of the altar"). This is a straightforward transitive construction with an explicit human agent implied by the hiphil verb form.

The second clause shifts grammatical voice: ha-nish'ar ba-dam ("the remainder in the blood") is the subject, and the verb yimmaTzeh ("it will be drained out") is niphal — passive or reflexive — so no agent is named for this second action. The destination is marked by the preposition 'el ("to") plus the construct noun yeSod ha-mizBeach ("the base of the altar"). This grammatical asymmetry — active causative verb for the first action, passive/reflexive verb for the second — distinguishes an explicit priestly act (sprinkling) from a process described without naming who performs it (draining).

The final clause, chaTat hu' ("it [is] a sin offering"), uses the independent personal pronoun hu' ("it", H1931) as a copula-like predicate, restating the classification of the entire rite already named in line 6.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the passive yimmaTzeh ("it will be drained out") with καταστραγγιεῖ ("it will drip/be drained"), an active future form, shifting the Hebrew's ambiguous agentless construction toward a more definite verbal action. The Vulgate similarly uses faciet distillare ("he will cause to drip"), explicitly supplying the priest as causative agent where the Hebrew niphal leaves the actor unspecified.