Summary

The verse prescribes the priest's actions for a Nazirite who has become ritually defiled by contact with a corpse: offering one bird as a sin offering and another as a burnt offering, making atonement for the person, and re-consecrating his head on that same day.

Key words

• cha.taT ("a sin offering", H2403H) — feminine singular noun designating the category of offering assigned to the first bird.
• khi.Per ("he will make atonement", H3722A) — piel sequential perfect; the intensive stem marks a purposeful, effecting action rather than a simple state.
• cha.Ta' ("he sinned", H2398) — qal perfect, a completed action referring back to the moment of contact with the corpse, contrasted with the priest's ongoing verbs.
• ki.Dash ("he will consecrate", H6942G) — piel sequential perfect, parallel in form to khi.Per, indicating a deliberate re-establishing of sanctified status.
• Na.fesh ("corpse", H5315M) — feminine singular noun; here used with the sense of a dead body rather than its more common meaning "soul/life."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of four sequential perfect verbs — 'a.Sah ("he will offer"), khi.Per ("he will make atonement"), ki.Dash ("he will consecrate") — each introduced by the narrative ve (H9001/H9002). This construction presents the priest's actions as a continuous procedural sequence: first the offerings are made, then atonement is performed, then consecration follows. The subject throughout is ha.Ko.hen ("the priest", H3548), explicitly named once and implied for the following verbs.

The clause with cha.Ta' ("he sinned", H2398) uses a simple qal perfect, distinguishing the person's prior action (contact resulting in defilement) from the priest's compound piel verbs of remedy. The phrase 'al ha.Nafesh ("on the corpse") uses Na.fesh (H5315M) in its sense of a dead body, a usage distinct from its more frequent meaning of "soul" or "life" elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The final clause anchors the entire ritual in time with ba.Yom ha.Hu' ("on that day," H3117G + H1931), specifying same-day consecration of the head, referring back to the Nazirite's head mentioned via the construct ro.Sh ("head of," H7218A) with pronominal suffix.

Differences between versions

The BSB translates the final clause as "he must consecrate his head again," adding a notion of repetition not present in the Hebrew ki.Dash ("he will consecrate," H6942G) or in the LXX's hagiasei ("he will sanctify") or the Vulgate's sanctificabit ("he will sanctify"), none of which carry an explicit "again."