Leviticus 7:16

Summary

The verse specifies timing rules for eating sacrificial meat when the offering is a vow (neder) or a freewill gift (nedavah). The meat must be eaten on the day the sacrifice is presented, and whatever remains may still be eaten on the following day.

Key words

• Neder ("vow", H5088) — masculine singular noun naming the first category of offering under discussion.
• Nedavah ("freewill offering", H5071) — feminine singular noun naming the second category, joined to neder by 'o ("or", H0176A).
• hakriv ("presenting/offering", H7126H) — Hiphil infinitive construct with pronominal suffix -o ("his"), meaning "in his presenting," a causative form indicating the act of bringing the sacrifice forward.
• ye'akhel ("it will be eaten", H0398) — Niphal imperfect, passive voice, appearing twice in the verse to mark the two permitted eating periods (the day of offering, and the next day).
• notar ("the remainder", H3498) — Niphal participle with definite article ha-, literally "the thing left over," functioning as the subject of the second ye'akhel.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a conditional construction, ve'im ("and if", H9002+H0518A), introducing two possible offering types, neder or nedavah, both governed by the construct phrase zevach korbano ("the sacrifice of his offering"), where zevach (H2077) and korban (H7133A) are stacked in construct chains to specify "the sacrifice-offering that is his." The timing clause beyom hakrivo ("on the day of his presenting," H3117G + H7126H) uses the Hiphil infinitive with a pronominal suffix, a common Hebrew way to express "when he offers," rather than a finite verb clause.

The verb ye'akhel is Niphal imperfect, a passive form meaning "it will be eaten," used impersonally — the text does not specify who eats, only that consumption must occur. This verb occurs twice, framing two temporal windows: the day of offering itself, and mimacharat ("from the next day," H4283), for whatever is called ha-notar ("the remainder," H3498), a Niphal participle meaning literally "what remains" or "what is left over." The grammatical parallelism — two clauses each ending in ye'akhel — creates a structural balance between the sacrifice-day portion and the next-day portion, both cast in the same passive verbal form.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the second ye'akhel not as a passive statement of fact but as a permission: "vesci licitum est" ("it is permitted to eat"), where the Hebrew Niphal imperfect yeakhel simply states "it will be eaten" without an explicit modal sense of permission. The Septuagint text supplied for this reference does not correspond to the Hebrew content of Leviticus 7:16 (it addresses a prohibition on eating blood), so no direct word-level comparison with the LXX is possible from the data given.