וַיֹּ֨אמֶר אֵלָ֜יו הָאִ֗ישׁ קַטֵּ֨ר יַקְטִיר֤וּן כַּיּוֹם֙ הַחֵ֔לֶב וְקַ֨ח־לְךָ֔ כַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר תְּאַוֶּ֖ה נַפְשֶׁ֑ךָ וְאָמַ֥ר ׀ (לו) [לֹא֙] כִּ֚י עַתָּ֣ה תִתֵּ֔ן וְאִם־לֹ֖א לָקַ֥חְתִּי בְחׇזְקָֽה׃
And if the response to this was, “Let them first turn the suet into smoke, and then take as much as you want,” he would reply, “No, hand it over at once or I’ll take it by force.”
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term containing אִישׁ.)
See my comment to the previous verse.
Here, the expression הָאִישׁ refers to its referent in terms of the previously depicted situation. Yet this noun phrase is not needed for the audience to track who’s doing what; rather, it is a case of overencoding the participant reference, in order to highlight the conflict of wills (as the scholarship of Frank Polak, Lénart de Regt, and others have shown). Thus it aids in this verse’s further explication of the depicted situation.
As for rendering into English, man in the NJPS ‘And if the man said to him’ is no longer suitable as a gender-inclusive noun. The revised rendering highlights the conflict situation without requiring a noun (which would either be unduly gendered or otherwise awkward).