Numbers 11:10

Summary

Moses hears the people weeping, each clan at the entrance of its own tent, and this triggers a divine response: Yehovah's anger burns intensely, and the situation is also displeasing in Moses' own perception.

Key words

• va-yishma' ("and he heard", H8085G) — qal narrative verb, opening the sequence of events with Moses as the perceiving subject.
• bokheh ("weeping", H1058) — qal participle describing the people's ongoing action, presenting the weeping as something currently in progress when Moses hears it.
• mishpechotav ("its clans", H4940) — feminine plural construct noun with possessive suffix, distributing the weeping across family units rather than the people as an undifferentiated mass.
• va-yichar ("it burned", H2734) — qal narrative verb describing Yehovah's 'af ("anger", H0639G) as kindling, using a construct chain ("the anger of Yehovah") that ties the emotion directly to the divine name.
• ra' ("[it was] displeasing", H7489A) — qal perfect verb, marking a completed state of being bad/evil in Moses' eyes, syntactically parallel to the previous clause about Yehovah's anger.

What the text says

The verse divides into two narrative movements joined by the vav-consecutive chain typical of Hebrew narrative prose. The first movement centers on va-yishma' Mosheh et-ha-'am bokheh ("and Moses heard the people weeping"), where ha-'am ("the people", H5971A) is marked by the direct object marker 'et (H0853) and modified by the participle bokheh. The participle indicates that the weeping is a continuous or repeated action perceived by Moses, not a single completed event. The phrase le-mishpechotav ish le-fetach 'oholo ("to its clans, each to the entrance of his tent") uses two construct chains stacked together — clan structure and tent entrance — to specify the location and social distribution of the weeping: not communal but scattered by family unit, each at their own dwelling.

The second movement, va-yichar 'af Yehovah me'od, employs the idiom "the anger of Yehovah burned," with 'af in construct before the divine name, intensified by me'od ("exceedingly", H3966). This is followed by u-ve-'einei Mosheh ra' ("and in the eyes of Moses [it was] bad"), where 'einei ("eyes of", H5869I) is a dual construct noun forming an idiom of perception or judgment. The qal perfect ra' closes the verse, syntactically balancing Yehovah's burning anger with Moses' own negative assessment, both introduced by the conjunction u- ("and", H9002).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the scene with κλαίοντων κατὰ δήμους αὐτῶν ("weeping according to their peoples"), using a genitive participle construction rather than the Hebrew's object-marked participial clause; it also appears to duplicate the divine-anger phrase (ἐθυὀργῇ μώθη ὀργῇ), likely a textual corruption in this Swete edition. The Vulgate's intoleranda res visa est ("the matter seemed unbearable") intensifies the plain Hebrew ra' ("bad/displeasing") into a stronger expression of intolerability not explicit in the Hebrew adjective/verb itself.