Numbers 19:18

Summary

Numbers 19:18 describes the ritual procedure for the purification water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer: a clean person takes hyssop, dips it in the water, and sprinkles it on the tent, its vessels, the people present, and anyone who had contact with a bone, a slain person, a corpse, or a grave.

Key words

• lakach ("he will take", H3947) — qal sequential perfect; continues the narrative chain of ritual actions, each verb building on the prior one.
• tavav ("he will dip", H2881) — qal sequential perfect; the same grammatical chain, indicating the hyssop is dipped into the water before use.
• hizzah ("he will spatter", H5137) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem marks that the subject causes the water to scatter onto the objects listed, distinct from a simple qal action.
• noge'a ("[one who] touched", H5060) — qal participle; functions as a substantive ("the toucher"), describing an ongoing or characteristic state of contact rather than a single past event.
• nefashot ("people", H5315) — feminine plural noun, literally "souls/lives", referring to the persons present at the location, not merely bodies.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ve-lakach, ve-taval, ve-hizzah), a common Hebrew narrative construction where each "and-then" clause depends on the initial action, producing a fluid sequence: take, dip, sprinkle. The subject of these verbs is ish tahor ("a clean person", H0376/H2889), introduced only after the first two verbs, which is typical of Biblical Hebrew syntax where the subject can follow initial verbs in a procedural sequence.

The object list for the sprinkling is marked by four repetitions of the preposition 'al ("on", H5921): the tent, the vessels, the nefashot ("persons", H5315) who were there, and finally "the one who touched" (ha-noge'a, participle). This final category is itself subdivided by three occurrences of 'o ("or", H0176), listing four sources of impurity: 'etzem ("bone", H6106), chalal ("slain", H2491), met ("dead [body]", H4191, itself a participle), and qaver ("grave", H6913). The use of the participle noge'a rather than a finite past-tense verb frames contact with impurity as a general category or class of person, not a single narrated event.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders ohel ("tent", H0168) with οἶκον ("house"), a shift in the domestic term. The Vulgate similarly uses "tentorium" ("tent"), closer to the Hebrew. The LXX also translates 'etzem as τοῦ ὀστέου τοῦ ἀνθρωπίνου ("the human bone"), adding the qualifier "human," which is not explicit in the Hebrew 'etzem ("bone", H6106) itself. The Vulgate compresses the list of contaminating objects ('etzem, chalal, met, qaver) into the general phrase "homines... contagione pollutos" ("men... polluted by such contagion"), rather than listing the four distinct sources individually as the Hebrew and LXX both do.