Leviticus 9:21

Summary

The verse describes Aaron performing a specific ritual gesture with two portions of the sacrificial animal — the chazot ("breasts", H2373) and the shoq hayamin ("thigh of the right [side]", H7785 + H3225G) — waving them as a tenufah ("wave-offering", H8573) before Yehovah. The final clause anchors this action in a prior command reported to have been given to Moses.

Key words

• chazot ("breasts", H2373) — feminine plural noun with definite article, marked as direct object by the preceding particle 'et (H0853).
• shoq ("thigh of...", H7785) — construct form, syntactically bound to hayamin, forming the phrase "thigh of the right [side]".
• heniph ("he waved", H5130B) — hiphil (causative) perfect, 3rd masculine singular, denoting a completed causative action ("caused to move/wave").
• tenufah ("a wave-offering", H8573) — noun sharing the same root as heniph, functioning as a cognate object of the verb.
• tzivah ("he had commanded", H6680) — piel (intensive) perfect, 3rd masculine singular; its subject is not lexically stated in this clause.

What the text says

The Hebrew clause places both direct objects — chazot and shoq hayamin — before the verb heniph, a fronting that emphasizes the items being handled prior to naming the action performed on them. The verb heniph (hiphil of the root meaning "to wave/swing") is followed by its own cognate noun tenufah, built from the identical root — a figura etymologica in which the verb and its object share the same semantic base, intensifying the ritual character of the gesture rather than adding new information. The phrase lifnei Yehovah ("before Yehovah", H6440G + H3068G) situates the action spatially/relationally in front of the divine name. The closing clause, ka'asher tzivah Mosheh ("as he had commanded Moses"), uses the piel verb tzivah without an explicit subject in the Hebrew text; grammatically, Moses (Mosheh, H4872) appears as the object of the verb, not its subject — the one who commanded is implied rather than stated by name in this specific clause.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders the closing clause as "sicut præceperat Moyses" ("as Moses had commanded"), placing Moses as the subject who commands. The Septuagint instead reads "ὃν τρόπον συνέταξεν κύριος τῷ Μωυσῇ" ("as the Lord commanded Moses"), explicitly supplying κύριος as subject and rendering Moses in the dative as recipient of the command — a reading that aligns with the Hebrew's implicit structure of Moses as object rather than agent. Additionally, the LXX translates heniph with ἀφεῖλεν ("he set apart/removed") rather than a term meaning "wave," and does not render tenufah as a separate cognate noun, omitting the verb-noun repetition present in the Hebrew.