Leviticus 7:17

Summary

The verse addresses what happens to meat from a sacrifice that remains uneaten until the third day: it specifies that such remaining meat must be burned in fire. The sentence is built as a casus pendens construction, naming the topic first (the remainder) before stating its fate.

Key words

• noTar ("remainder", H3498) — niphal participle, functioning here as a substantive ("the thing remaining"); the niphal stem marks it as the result of an action done to it (something left over), not an active doer.
• besar ("meat of", H1320) — construct form, linking directly to ha-zavach ("the sacrifice") to specify whose meat is in view.
• zavach ("sacrifice", H2077) — absolute noun following the construct chain, identifying the source of the meat.
• shelishi ("third", H7992) — ordinal number modifying yom ("day", H3117G), fixing the specific temporal boundary.
• yissaref ("it will be burned", H8313) — niphal imperfect, third person masculine; the passive form places the meat as the entity acted upon, with the imperfect aspect conveying a mandated or repeated future action rather than a single past event.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with ve-ha-notar ("and the remainder"), a participial noun functioning as the grammatical subject placed at the head of the clause — a common Hebrew pattern (casus pendens) that foregrounds the topic before the rest of the sentence elaborates on it. The construct chain besar ha-zevach ("the meat of the sacrifice") specifies exactly what is left over, while ba-yom ha-shelishi ("on the third day") anchors the timing using a prepositional phrase with the article and ordinal number.

The final element, ba-esh yissaref ("in the fire it will be burned"), places the instrument (esh, "fire", H0784) before the verb, and closes the sentence with the niphal imperfect yissaref. Both the participle notar and the final verb yissaref use the niphal stem, framing the meat throughout as something acted upon rather than an actor — it remains (passively) and it is burned (passively), with no named human agent doing either action in the grammar itself.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the final clause with an active construction, ignis absumet ("fire will consume [it]"), making "fire" the grammatical subject performing the action, whereas the Hebrew ba-esh yissaref keeps the meat as subject and treats fire as the means, using a passive verb form.

The LXX text supplied here does not correspond to this verse's content — it speaks of a soul (psyche) eating blood and being cut off from its people, a theme absent from the Hebrew of Leviticus 7:17 as given in the word-by-word data.