Numbers 11:19

Summary

The verse enumerates a sequence of time spans — one day, two days, five days, ten days, twenty days — each negated, building toward the extended duration that follows in the next verse. The repeated negation with escalating numbers of days emphasizes that the eating in question will not be limited to any of these shorter periods.

Key words

• tokh.Lu ("you will eat", H0398) — Qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, expressing future or ongoing action; carries the paragoric n (H9013) attached as a suffix, which intensifies or emphasizes the verb form without changing its basic meaning.
• Yom ("a day", H3117G) — masculine singular noun, used here as the base unit before larger groupings of days follow.
• yo.Ma.yim ("two days", H3117G) — the dual form of the same noun for "day," marking exactly two units rather than a plural count.
• cha.mi.Shah ("five", H2568) — cardinal number, common gender singular, modifying the plural ya.Mim ("days").
• 'es.Rim ("twenty", H6242) — cardinal number, masculine plural, the highest number in this escalating list, paired with the singular Yom rather than the plural form used with the smaller numbers.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of five negated time expressions, each introduced by lo' ("not", H3808): "not one day," "and not two days," "and not five days," "and not ten days," "and not twenty days." This structure creates a rhetorical escalation, doubling and multiplying the count of days (1, 2, 5, 10, 20) rather than listing them consecutively (1, 2, 3, 4...), which produces a rising cadence emphasizing the disproportion between these short periods and whatever extended duration is being contrasted.

A grammatical detail lost in translation is the shift in number for the noun "day" itself: singular Yom for "one day," dual yo.Ma.yim for "two days," and plural ya.Mim for five, ten, and twenty days. This morphological variation reflects normal Hebrew grammatical number agreement rather than any semantic distinction beyond counting. Additionally, the verb tokh.Lu carries a paragogic nun — an added letter at the end of the imperfect form — which in Biblical Hebrew often adds emphasis or solemnity to the verbal action without altering its core meaning of future/durative eating.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the sequence with οὐχ ("not") followed by οὐδὲ ("nor") repeated four times, structurally mirroring the Hebrew's repeated negation, though the Greek collapses "one day" and "two days" into ἡμέραν μίαν ("day one") and δύο ("two") without repeating the noun "days" for the second term, unlike the Hebrew's explicit dual yo.Ma.yim. The Vulgate similarly uses "non... nec... vel... aut... nec" but drops the noun "day/days" entirely after the first instance, relying on the numbers alone (uno die, nec duobus, vel quinque aut decem, nec viginti) — a more elliptical construction than the Hebrew, which repeats "day(s)" with nearly every number.