Leviticus 6:19

Summary

The verse is a brief narrative formula introducing divine speech: Yehovah addresses Moses. It contains no content of the speech itself, only the introductory frame that precedes the instructions that follow.

Key words

• va-y'daBer ("and he spoke", H1696G) — piel verb with narrative vav, marking a new sequential event in the story; the piel stem here carries the sense of formal or authoritative speech rather than casual talk.
• Yehovah ("Yehovah", H3068G) — the divine name functioning as the grammatical subject of the verb.
• 'el ("to", H0413) — preposition marking Moses as the recipient/addressee of the speech.
• Mosheh ("Moses", H4872) — proper noun, indirect object of the verb, the human party addressed.
• leMor ("saying", H0559) — qal infinitive construct with prefixed le-, introducing the direct discourse that follows; it functions like a colon opening a quotation.

What the text says

The sentence follows a fixed syntactic pattern common in narrative sections of the Torah: verb–subject–prepositional phrase–infinitive. The verb va-y'daBer ("and he spoke", H1696G) opens the clause with the narrative vav, which in Biblical Hebrew signals sequential action within a storyline — this event follows directly from what precedes it in the text. The subject Yehovah (H3068G) follows the verb, which is normal verb-first word order in Hebrew narrative clauses.

The phrase 'el-Mosheh ("to Moses", H0413 + H4872) identifies the addressee using the preposition 'el, indicating direction of speech rather than mere proximity. The final word, leMor ("saying", H0559), is an infinitive construct built from the root 'mr ("to say") with the prefixed preposition le-. This construction is the standard Hebrew device for introducing reported speech; it has no independent semantic content beyond signaling that direct discourse follows. The verse itself is purely introductory — it establishes speaker, addressee, and the onset of quoted material, without containing any of the substantive instruction.

Differences between versions

The Greek (LXX) uses ἐλάλησεν ("he spoke") with κύριος ("Lord") as subject and λέγων ("saying") as a participle rather than an infinitive, a common shift in Greek narrative style. The Vulgate's Locutusque est Dominus ad Moysen, dicens mirrors the Hebrew structure closely, using dicens ("saying") as a present participle paralleling leMor. The BSB renders the formula more concisely as "Then the LORD said to Moses," omitting an explicit equivalent for leMor, while the SBLIBRE Spanish version doubles the verb ("le habló... y le dijo") where the Hebrew has only one verb of speaking followed by the infinitive marker.