Leviticus 6:4

Summary

The verse opens a legal apodosis: once a person has sinned and become guilty, he must restore what was taken — whether through robbery, extortion, a broken trust deposit, or a found lost item. The Hebrew lists four distinct categories of wrongfully held property, each defined by its own relative clause.

Key words

• ve.haYah ("it will be", H1961) — sequential perfect opening the apodosis; together with ki ("that/if", H3588A) it frames the whole verse as the consequence-clause of a conditional legal case.
• ye.che.Ta' ("he will sin", H2398) — imperfect verb marking the condition as not-yet-completed, i.e., the triggering offense.
• 'a.Shem ("he will be guilty", H0816) — sequential perfect following ye.che.Ta'; the two verbs chain sin and resulting guilt as sequential stages, not synonyms.
• he.Shiv ("he will restore", H7725H) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect: the subject is made to cause the object's return, distinguishing "restoring" from a simple act of giving.
• ha.fe.Kad ("it was entrusted", H6485J) — hophal (causative passive) perfect: the item's entrustment is described from the object's point of view, without naming who did the entrusting.

What the text says

The sentence is built as a chain of sequential-perfect verbs (ve.haYah, 'a.Shem, he.Shiv) following an initial conditional marker ki with an imperfect verb (ye.che.Ta'). This grammatical pattern — imperfect condition followed by a string of vav-sequential perfects — is typical of Hebrew casuistic law: it sets up "when X happens" and then narrates the required response as a sequence of obligatory actions rather than as isolated commands.

After the verb he.Shiv ("he will restore"), the text lists four objects, each introduced by the object marker 'et and defined by a relative clause with 'asher ("which/that", H0834A): the ge.ze.Lah ("thing robbed", H1500) that ga.Zal ("he robbed", H1497); the 'O.shek ("oppression", H6233) that 'a.Shak ("he oppressed", H6231); the pi.ka.Don ("item entrusted", H6487) that ha.fe.Kad ("was entrusted", H6485J) — using a passive hophal form that omits the agent of entrustment; and the 'a.ve.Dah ("thing lost", H0009) that ma.Tza' ("he found", H4672). Each clause is joined by 'o ("or", H0176A), producing a list of four legally distinct categories of wrongful possession rather than one general offense.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate fragment supplied here, convicta delicti ("the offense having been proven/convicted"), condenses the Hebrew's extended conditional-and-restitution structure into a short ablative phrase and does not preserve the four-part list of ge.ze.Lah, 'O.shek, pi.ka.Don, and 'a.ve.Dah found in the Hebrew. The LXX (Swete) follows the Hebrew's structure closely, rendering the same four categories (ἅρπαγμα, ἀδίκημα, παραθήκη, ἀπωλία) with matching relative clauses, tracking the Hebrew's syntax more directly than the Vulgate excerpt does.