Leviticus 8:10

Summary

Moses takes the anointing oil and uses it to anoint the tabernacle and everything inside it, thereby consecrating them. The verse presents three consecutive actions—taking, anointing, and consecrating—joined by narrative vav-consecutive forms.

Key words

• yiqqach ("he took", H3947) — qal narrative form; opens the sequence of actions performed by Moses.
• shemen ha-mishchah ("oil of anointing", H8081/H4888A) — construct chain: "oil" governs "the anointing," marking this as a specific, defined substance rather than oil in general.
• yimshach ("he anointed", H4886) — qal narrative form, continuing the chain of actions ("and then he anointed").
• mishkan ("tabernacle", H4908) — definite noun, the object receiving the anointing.
• yeqaddesh ("he set apart as holy", H6942) — piel narrative form; the piel stem intensifies the action, marking a deliberate, effective act of consecration rather than a simple state.

What the text says

The Hebrew verse is built as a chain of three narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — yiqqach, yimshach, yeqaddesh — each meaning "and then he did X." This grammatical structure presents the actions as a single continuous sequence of events performed by Moses, not as separate or isolated occurrences. The subject "Moses" (Mosheh, H4872) is stated once, at the first verb, and carries through the rest of the sentence.

The phrase kol asher bo ("all that [was] in it") uses the relative particle asher (H0834A) plus a preposition with pronominal suffix (bo, "in it") to extend the object of anointing beyond the tabernacle itself to its contents. The final verb, yeqaddesh, is in the piel stem, which in Biblical Hebrew often marks intensive or causative action — here, the act of making something holy through the completed anointing. The object suffix otam ("them", H0853+H9038) refers back grammatically to both the tabernacle and everything within it, tying the whole sequence together: what was anointed is what became consecrated.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text presents three verbs (took, anointed, consecrated), but the Vulgate compresses this into two actions: "Tulit... oleum, quo linivit tabernaculum cum omni supellectili sua" ("he took... the oil, with which he anointed the tabernacle with all its furniture"). The Vulgate has no separate verb corresponding to yeqaddesh ("consecrated"); the anointing (linivit) alone conveys the completed action, without a distinct term for holiness-making. The LXX excerpt provided stops after "καὶ ἔλαβεν Μωυσῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐλαίου τῆς χρίσεως" ("and Moses took from the oil of anointing"), preserving only the first action from the Hebrew's three-part sequence, with no continuation shown for the anointing or consecrating of the tabernacle.