Leviticus 8:35

Summary

Moses instructs Aaron and his sons to remain at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting continuously, day and night, for seven days, keeping Yehovah's charge under threat of death. The verse closes with Moses affirming that this instruction follows a command he himself received.

Key words

• tešəvû ("you will remain", H3427) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural: an ongoing/future obligation to stay in place, not a single event.
• šiḇʿaṯ yamîm ("seven of days", H7651/H3117) — construct chain functioning as an accusative of duration, specifying the length of the required stay.
• ušmartem ("and you will keep", H8104) — sequential (vav-consecutive) perfect continuing the force of the preceding imperfect; it carries forward the command as part of the same instruction sequence.
• mišmereṯ YHWH ("the duty/charge of Yehovah", H4931/H3068) — construct noun naming what must be kept, i.e., an obligation belonging to Yehovah.
• ṣuwwêṯî ("I have been commanded", H6680) — pual (passive, intensive-stem) perfect, 1st person singular: the verb is passive and does not name who gave the command within this clause.

What the text says

The verse opens with the locative phrase petaḥ ʾohel moʿed ("entrance of the tent of meeting") fronted before the verb tešəvû, placing emphasis on the location where the addressees must stay. The imperfect verb form conveys a continuing, repeated action extending through the specified time — reinforced by the merism yomam valaylah ("day and night") and the duration phrase šiḇʿaṯ yamîm ("seven days"). The switch to the sequential perfect ušmartem ties the act of "keeping" (šamar, H8104) grammatically to the preceding instruction, presenting it as a continuation of the same directive rather than a separate command.

The clause mišmereṯ YHWH uses a construct relationship to identify the object to be guarded as something belonging specifically to Yehovah, without further elaboration in the Hebrew of what this "duty" concretely entails beyond the surrounding narrative. The final clause uses the pual perfect ṣuwwêṯî, a passive verb form that reports the action of being commanded without grammatically specifying the agent — the person doing the commanding is absent from the verb form itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the final purpose clause as ἵνα ἀποθάνητε ("so that you may die"), lacking a negation, where the Hebrew lo tamutu ("you will not die", H3808) explicitly negates death as the outcome of obedience. Additionally, where the Hebrew passive ṣuwwêṯî leaves the commanding agent unstated, the LXX supplies κύριος ὁ θεός ("the Lord God") as the explicit subject of the command (ἐνετείλατό μοι κύριος ὁ θεός), while the Vulgate's mihi praeceptum est ("it has been commanded to me") likewise remains agentless, matching the Hebrew's passive construction more closely than the LXX does.