Leviticus 8:20

Summary

The verse describes the ritual cutting of the ram into pieces and Moses burning its head, its cut pieces, and its suet on the altar. This is part of the ordination ceremony for Aaron and his sons described in Leviticus 8.

Key words

• 'ayil ("ram", H0352A) — masculine singular noun with definite article ha, the direct object of the cutting action.
• nittach ("he cut in pieces", H5408) — piel perfect verb, third masculine singular; the piel stem gives an intensive nuance to the cutting, marking it as a thorough ritual division rather than a single cut.
• netachav ("its pieces", H5409) — masculine plural noun in construct form with a pronominal suffix "its," indicating the pieces belong specifically to the ram just mentioned.
• yaqter ("he made smoke", H6999A) — hiphil narrative verb, third masculine singular, causative in force ("he caused to go up in smoke"); the narrative vav prefix (item 9) links this action sequentially to the cutting.
• pader ("suet", H6309) — masculine singular noun with definite article, the last item listed among what is burned.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides into two clauses joined by the narrative vav. The first clause, ve'et-ha'ayil nittach lintachav ("and the ram he cut into its pieces"), places the ram as object before the verb, a common fronting pattern in Hebrew narrative that gives it emphasis as the item being processed. The verb nittach is piel, which in this stem often intensifies or thoroughly performs the action denoted by the root — here the ram is completely divided into its component pieces, expressed by the same root ntach used twice (verb and noun), a construction that stresses that the pieces are precisely "the pieces belonging to it."

The second clause, introduced by the narrative vav attached to yaqter, shifts to Moses as subject: vayyaqter Mosheh 'et-harosh ve'et-hanetachim ve'et-hapader ("and Moses made smoke of the head and the pieces and the suet"). The hiphil form of yaqter is causative, indicating that Moses caused these parts to become smoke, i.e., he burned them upon the altar so that they rose as smoke. Three objects are listed, each marked separately with the direct object marker 'et, giving each item — head, pieces, suet — equal syntactic weight as distinct components consumed in the burning.

Differences between versions

The LXX uses ἐκρεανόμησεν ("he divided into flesh-portions") for nittach, and ἀνήνεγκεν ("he brought up/offered") for yaqter, a verb of offering rather than one specifically denoting smoke-production. The Vulgate's adolevit igni ("he burned with fire") makes the burning explicit with "fire," a detail not lexically present in the Hebrew verb itself, which only denotes "causing to smoke."