Leviticus 8:14

Summary

The verse narrates that the sin offering bull was brought forward, after which Aaron and his sons placed their hands on its head. The Hebrew text does not name the subject of the first verb explicitly, though the Septuagint and Vulgate identify him as Moses.

Key words

• va-yagesh ("he brought near", H5066H) — hiphil (causative) narrative form: the subject causes the bull to approach; the grammatical subject is only "he," recoverable from context, not stated by name in the Hebrew.
• par ha-chattat ("the bull of the sin offering", H6499 + H2403H) — construct chain "bull of the sin offering," repeated at the end of the verse, framing the action between the bull's arrival and the hand-leaning rite.
• va-yismokh ("he leaned", H5564) — qal narrative verb, describing the physical act of pressing hands, here with a compound subject (Aaron and his sons).
• u-vanav ("and his sons", H1121A + suffix) — construct noun with pronominal suffix "his," joined to Aharon by the conjunction u ("and", H9002), forming the compound subject of the leaning action.
• yedeihem ("their hands", H3027G + H9028) — dual construct noun with plural suffix "their," marking that both hands (dual form) of the group belong to Aaron and his sons collectively.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence chain uses two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs: va-yagesh ("he brought near") and va-yismokh ("he leaned"), typical of Hebrew narrative sequence where each clause continues the story with "and then." The subject of the first verb, va-yagesh, is not named in this verse — the Hebrew simply has "he brought near the bull of the sin offering," leaving the antecedent to be supplied from the surrounding narrative context (the preceding verses of the chapter, where Moses performs the priestly consecration actions). This is a common feature of Hebrew narrative style, where pronominal subjects encoded in verb morphology do not require a stated noun if the referent is already established in discourse.

The second clause supplies an explicit compound subject, Aharon ("Aaron", H175) and u-vanav ("and his sons"), performing the action of yismokh ("he leaned") on rosh par ha-chattat ("the head of the bull of the sin offering"). The phrase par ha-chattat appears twice, bracketing the verse and reinforcing the identity of the animal across both actions.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew leaves the subject of the first verb unstated (grammatically just "he"). The LXX renders this explicitly as Mōusēs ("Moses"), and the Vulgate likewise implies Moses as the subject through narrative continuity from the preceding verses (a pattern also followed by the English and Spanish translations provided, which name "Moses" explicitly). The Hebrew text itself does not contain the name at this point in the verse.