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It will belong to Aaron and his sons, and they must eat it in a holy place because it is most holy to him, a perpetually-allotted portion[a] from the gifts of the Lord.”

A Case of Blaspheming the Name

10 Now[b] an Israelite woman’s son whose father was an Egyptian went out among the Israelites, and the Israelite woman’s son and an Israelite man[c] had a fight in the camp. 11 The Israelite woman’s son misused the Name and cursed,[d] so they brought him to Moses. (Now his mother’s name was Shelomith, daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan.)

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Footnotes

  1. Leviticus 24:9 tn Or “a perpetual regulation”; NRSV “a perpetual due.”
  2. Leviticus 24:10 tn Heb “And.”
  3. Leviticus 24:10 tn Heb “the Israelite man,” but Smr has no article, and the point is that there was a conflict between the man of mixed background and a man of full Israelite descent.
  4. Leviticus 24:11 tn The verb rendered “misused” means literally “to bore through, to pierce” (HALOT 719 s.v. נקב qal); it is from נָקַב (naqav), not קָבַב (qavav; see the participial form in v. 16a). Its exact meaning here is uncertain. The two verbs together may form a hendiadys, “he pronounced by cursing blasphemously” (B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 166), the idea being one of the following: (1) he pronounced the name “Yahweh” in a way or with words that amounted to “some sort of verbal aggression against Yahweh himself” (E. S. Gerstenberger, Leviticus [OTL], 362), (2) he pronounced a curse against the man using the name “Yahweh” (N. H. Snaith, Leviticus and Numbers [NCBC], 110; G. J. Wenham, Leviticus [NICOT], 311), or (3) he pronounced the name “Yahweh” and thereby blasphemed, since the “Name” was never to be pronounced (a standard Jewish explanation). In one way or another, the offense surely violated Exod 20:7, one of the ten commandments, and the same verb for cursing is used explicitly in Exod 22:28 (27 HT) for prohibition against “cursing” God. For a full discussion of these and related options for interpreting this verse see P. J. Budd, Leviticus (NCBC), 335-36; J. E. Hartley, Leviticus (WBC), 408-9; and Levine, 166.