Leviticus 7:23

Summary

This verse opens a divine instruction to Moses to relay a dietary law to the Israelites: they are forbidden from eating the fat of three specific animals — the ox, the ram/young sheep, and the goat. The command uses direct imperative speech followed by a plural prohibition addressed to the community.

Key words

• daBer ("speak", H1696G) — Piel imperative, giving the verse its force as a direct, intensified command to transmit speech, not merely to speak casually.
• leMor ("saying", H0559) — Qal infinitive construct with prefixed le, functioning to introduce the reported speech that follows, a standard formula linking command to content.
• Chelev ("fat of", H2459) — masculine singular construct noun, grammatically bound to the following list of animals, marking it as the fat belonging to each one specifically.
• Shor ("an ox", H7794), Khesev ("a young ram", H3775), 'Ez ("a goat", H5795) — three absolute nouns joined by the conjunction ve-/va- ("and", H9002), forming a coordinated list of the animals whose fat is restricted.
• to.Khe.lu ("you must eat", H0398) — Qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, preceded by the negation lo' ("not", H3808), producing a durative prohibition addressed to the whole community rather than an individual.

What the text says

The verse divides into two grammatical units. The first is the introductory command, daBer 'el-benei Yisra'El leMor ("speak to the people of Israel, saying"), where the Piel imperative daBer signals an authoritative, formal act of transmission, and the infinitive leMor opens direct discourse. The second unit is the prohibition itself, built around the construct chain kol-chelev shor ve-khesev va-'ez ("any fat of an ox and a ram and a goat"). The construct noun chelev ("fat of") governs all three following animal names as its objects, so the fat is treated as a single category applying across the three species rather than as three separate substances.

The prohibition closes with lo' to.Khe.lu ("you must eat"), where the imperfect verb form combined with the negation produces an ongoing prohibition — the imperfect aspect in Biblical Hebrew often conveys continuing or repeated action, so the restriction is not a single event but a standing rule addressed to the plural "you" (the assembled Israelites), matching the plural audience introduced in the first clause.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate (Adipem ovis, et bovis, et capræ non comedetis) and the Spanish translations preserve the same three-animal structure as the Hebrew, though the Vulgate lists sheep first rather than ox. The Septuagint text supplied here (Swete) does not correspond to this content at all — it speaks of the blood of the peace offering and the "right shoulder" (ὁ βραχίων ὁ δεξιὸς) as a portion for Aaron's sons, a subject matching a different part of Leviticus 7, not the fat prohibition found in the Hebrew of 7:23.