Leviticus 8:33

Summary

The verse commands the priests not to leave the entrance of the Tent of Meeting for seven days, until the days of their ordination are completed, because the process of "filling their hand" will take seven days.

Key words

• te.tze.'U ("you must go out", H3318G) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, negated by lo' ("not", H3808); expresses a prohibition applying continuously across the seven-day period.
• me.Lot ("are completed", H4390) — qal infinitive of the root מלא ("to fill"); marks the temporal boundary ("until the day when... are completed") rather than a finite action.
• mi.lu.'ei ("installation", H4394) — masculine plural construct noun from the same root מלא; here functioning as a technical term for the ordination process, literally tied to the idea of "filling."
• ye.ma.Le' ("he will fill", H4390) — piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular, same root מלא as me.Lot and mi.lu.'ei, but in the intensive piel stem, giving "he will fill/complete" as a deliberate causative action.
• yed.khem ("your hand", H3027R + H9026) — construct noun with 2nd person masculine plural suffix, forming the idiom "fill your hand," the object of ye.ma.Le'.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a single root, מלא ("to fill"), which appears three times in different grammatical forms: as an infinitive (me.Lot), as a plural noun (mi.lu.'ei), and as a finite piel verb (ye.ma.Le'). This repetition creates a wordplay that ties the notion of "completion of days" to the notion of "filling the hand," the idiomatic expression for the ordination process. The prohibition itself is carried by te.tze.'U ("you must go out", H3318G) negated by lo', a qal imperfect that denotes a standing restriction rather than a single event — the priests are not to leave the entrance of the Tent of Meeting for the specified duration.

The clause introduced by ki ("for", H3588A) functions as a causal explanation: the seven-day restriction exists precisely because the "filling of the hand" (ye.ma.Le' et-yed.khem) requires seven days to occur. The construct chain yemei mille'eikhem ("the days of your installation") ties the noun mi.lu.'ei directly to the days mentioned earlier, reinforcing the temporal frame set by me.Lot.

Differences between versions

The LXX rendering given lacks an explicit negative verb corresponding to lo' tetze'u ("you must not go out"); it moves directly from "from the door of the tabernacle" to "seven days," omitting the overt prohibition found in the Hebrew and in the Vulgate ("non exibitis"). The Vulgate translates mi.lu.'ei and the phrase built on yed.khem both as "consecratio" ("finitur consecratio"), collapsing the Hebrew's threefold repetition of the root מלא into a single Latin term, rather than preserving the "filling of the hand" idiom found in the Hebrew.