1. And He called to Moses and the LORD spoke to him. The translation reproduces the oddness of the Hebrew. According to normative usage, one would have expected “And the LORD called to Moses and He spoke to him.” Is the postponement of the subject a maneuver to isolate and emphasize the act of calling? Several medieval commentators argue that the calling, or summoning, is the necessary preceding stage before divine speech, and perhaps for that reason it needs to be placed in the syntactic foreground. This verb, the first word of the text (wayiqraʾ), is the prevalent Hebrew name for the book, although another ancient designation, torat kohanim, “teaching of the priests,” parallels the Greek topical title “Leviticus.” Rashbam, the twelfth-century French Hebrew exegete, notes that Exodus ends by reporting Moses’s being unable to enter the Tent of Meeting because it was filled with the LORD’s glory, and now the LORD must address Moses from that very place in order to speak to him.

2. any person. The Hebrew ʾadam can refer to either sex. See the comment on Genesis 1:27.

bring forward. The verb hiqriv throughout this text has the technical sense of “introduce,” or “present,” in the sacred space of the cult. The cognate noun, qorban, “offering,” is distinctive of Leviticus. Exodus concluded with a notice of God’s relationship with Israel in the wilderness, indicating how He led the people on its peregrinations with the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. Now, the Tabernacle having been completed (Exodus 35–37), attention is turned to how Israel on its part is to pursue its relationship with God by offering sacrifices in the sanctuary that has been constructed.

5. he shall slaughter. The person presenting the offering butchers the animal, and then the priests take charge of laying out the parts on the altar and burning them.

7. the sons of Aaron the priest. Three ancient versions read here “The sons of Aaron, the priests,” in the plural, “priests” modifying the sons and not Aaron, as elsewhere in this chapter.

14. from the birds. The stipulation of this option appears to be, as several commentators have noted, an accommodation for the poor, who would have been hard put to sacrifice something as valuable as a bull or a sheep.

16. its crop with its feathers. There is some question about the meaning of each of these terms. Jacob Milgrom makes an elaborate argument that the first term, murʾah, means “crissum,” i.e., the area around the cloacal opening beneath the bird’s tail. He is the author of a three-volume, 3000-page commentary on Leviticus that in its sheer comprehensiveness will remain a central reference for philological and historical issues involved in this book. Consequently, his work will often be referred to here. He is an invaluable guide but of course not infallible, and in the present instance there remains a margin of conjecture in his identification of murʾah, and since few readers will understand what a crissum is without recourse to a dictionary, this translation retains the more familiar “crop.” The second term, notsah, has been linked with the word for “excrement” by some medieval and modern commentators, but it invariably means “feather” elsewhere in Hebrew usage. If the skin was stripped from a large animal and not made part of the sacrifice, it is logical that the feathers would be excluded in the sacrifice of a bird.