20:27 “‘A man or woman who 10 has in them a spirit of the dead or a familiar spirit 11 must be put to death. They must pelt them with stones; 12 their blood guilt is on themselves.’”
1 tn Or “a perpetual regulation”; cf. NASB “a permanent ordinance”; NRSV “as their perpetual due.”
2 tn Heb “for your generations”; cf. NIV “for the generations to come.”
3 tn Heb “touches them”; the referent has been specified in the translation for clarity. In this context “them” must refer to the “gifts” of the
4 tn Or “anyone/anything that touches them shall become holy” (J. Milgrom, Leviticus [AB], 1:443-56). The question is whether this refers to the contagious nature of holy objects (cf. NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT) or whether it simply sets forth a demand that anyone who touches the holy gifts of the
5 tn Heb “And you shall keep.”
6 tn Heb “which the man shall do them and shall live in them.” The term for “a man, human being; mankind” (אָדָם, ’adam; see the note on Lev 1:2) in this case refers to any person among “mankind,” male or female. The expression וָחַי (vakhay, “and shall live”) looks like the adjective “living” so it is written וְחָיָה (vÿkhayah) in Smr, but the MT form is simply the same verb written as a double ayin verb (see HALOT 309 s.v. חיה qal and GKC 218 §76.i; cf. Lev 25:35).
9 tn Heb “to not do from the statutes of the detestable acts.”
10 tn Heb “and you will not.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) can be considered to have resultative force here.
13 sn The prohibition here concerns those who would seek special knowledge through the spirits of the dead, whether the dead in general or dead relatives in particular (i.e., familiar spirits; see J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 321, and B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 134). Cf. Lev 20:6 below.
17 tc Smr, LXX, Syriac, and some Targum
18 tn See the note on the phrase “familiar spirit” in Lev 19:31 above.
19 tn This is not the most frequently-used Hebrew verb for stoning, but a word that refers to the action of throwing, slinging, or pelting someone with stones (see the note on v. 2 above). Smr and LXX have “you [plural] shall pelt them with stones.”
21 tn Heb “And from the hand of a son of a foreigner.”
22 tn Heb “for their being ruined [is] in them, flaw is in them”; NRSV “are mutilated, with a blemish in them”; NIV “are deformed and have defects.” The MT term מָשְׁחָתָם (moshkhatam, “their being ruined”) is a Muqtal form (= Hophal participle) from שָׁחַת (shakhat, “to ruin”). Smr has plural בהם משׁחתים (“deformities in them”; cf. the LXX translation). The Qumran Leviticus scroll (11QpaleoLev) has תימ הם[…], in which case the restored participle would appear to be the same as Smr, but there is no בְּ (bet) preposition before the pronoun, yielding “they are deformed” (see D. N. Freedman and K. A. Mathews, The Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll, 41 and the remarks in J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 358).
25 tn Heb “and your brothers, the sons of Israel, a man in his brother you shall not rule in him in violence.”