Leviticus 6:3

Summary

This verse continues a legal enumeration of wrongful acts: a person who finds lost property ('avedah, H0009), denies having it, and swears falsely about the matter. It closes the list of offenses that fall under the category of "sinning in one of all these things that a person may do."

Key words

• matsa ("he has found", H4672) — qal perfect, marking a completed act: the finding of the lost item as the starting condition.
• kichesh ("he will deny", H3584) — piel sequential perfect; the piel stem intensifies the verb, indicating an active, deliberate denial rather than a simple negation.
• nishba' ("he will swear an oath", H7650) — niphal sequential perfect; the niphal here functions in a reflexive/middle sense typical of oath-taking verbs in Hebrew, "he swears (himself)."
• sheqer ("falsehood", H8267) — masculine singular noun governed by the preposition 'al ("on/concerning", H5921A), specifying the content of the oath as false.
• chato' ("sin", H2398) — qal infinitive, expressing purpose or result ("so as to sin," or "in sinning"), tying the whole list of acts to the general category of sin.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (kichesh, nishba') following an initial qal perfect (matsa'), a common Hebrew narrative-legal structure where one completed action leads naturally into the next: finding leads to denial, denial leads to a false oath. The piel form of kachash signals more than passive non-disclosure — it denotes an intensified, willful act of deceit "in it" (bah, referring back to the feminine noun 'avedah, "lost thing"). The niphal form of shava' for swearing is grammatically fixed for oath contexts in Hebrew and does not carry a distinct passive meaning here beyond the idiomatic sense of "taking an oath."

The final clause, 'achat mikol 'asher ya'aseh ha'adam lachato' vahennah ("one of all that a person may do, sinning by them"), uses the feminine plural pronoun hennah ("them", H9039) to refer back to the list of feminine-gendered matters catalogued earlier in the legal unit (deposits, lost items, and similar cases). The qal imperfect ya'aseh ("he will do", H6213A) indicates a general, potential action rather than one already completed, framing this clause as a summary category covering any of the preceding offenses.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders sheqer ("falsehood") with the adverb ἀδίκως ("unjustly"), shifting the noun into a manner-adverb modifying the swearing itself, whereas the Hebrew treats sheqer as the object of the oath ("swears concerning falsehood"). The Vulgate compresses the final relative clause ('achat mikol 'asher ya'aseh ha'adam lachato' vahennah) into a general statement, "quodlibet aliud ex pluribus fecerit, in quibus solent peccare homines" ("or has done anything else, among the many things in which people usually sin"), losing the specific feminine-plural back-reference (hennah) that ties the clause to the preceding list of items in the Hebrew text.