Numbers 11:22

Summary

The verse presents two rhetorical questions Moses raises about provisioning the people with meat: whether slaughtering all the flocks and herds, or gathering all the fish of the sea, would be sufficient for them. The Hebrew repeats a fixed phrase after each conditional clause that idiomatically expresses "sufficiency" rather than literally describing an action of finding.

Key words

• ha ("¿", H9008) — the interrogative particle opening the entire sentence, marking it as a question from the outset, governing both parallel clauses that follow.
• yishaChet ("will it be slaughtered", H7819A) — niphal (passive) imperfect; the flock and herd are grammatical subjects of a passive action, with no stated agent of the slaughtering.
• matza ("someone will find", H4672) — qal sequential perfect, repeated twice (lines 9 and 22); despite its basic sense of "to find," this verb functions here as the predicate for "being enough."
• 'im ("if"/"or", H0518A) — introduces the second rhetorical question as an alternative to the first, structuring the verse as an either/or comparison.
• ye'aSef ("will it be gathered", H0622) — niphal imperfect, parallel in form to yishaChet, describing the fish of the sea being passively gathered.

What the text says

The verse is built as two parallel conditional-interrogative clauses, each following the same pattern: subject + niphal passive verb + lahem ("for them", H9038 with preposition) + u-matza lahem ("and it found/sufficed for them"). The first clause asks about tzon ("a flock", H6629G) and vaKar ("a herd", H1241) being slaughtered; the second, introduced by 'im ("if", H0518A), asks about kol de.gei ha.yam ("all the fish of the sea") being gathered. Both verbs — yishaChet and ye'aSef — are niphal imperfects, indicating passive, ongoing or potential action without naming who would do the slaughtering or gathering.

The repeated verb matza ("to find", H4672) does not literally mean "to find" in this context; it is followed each time by lahem, and functions as an idiom for sufficiency — "would it be found [enough] for them." This idiomatic use is not visible from a literal word-by-word rendering and requires recognizing the fixed phrase matza lahem as a unit meaning "be sufficient for them," rather than parsing "find" and "for them" as separate literal components.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verb matza ("to find", H4672) is rendered by the LXX as ἀρκέσει ("it will suffice") and by the Vulgate as sufficere / satient ("to suffice" / "satisfy"). Both versions interpret the idiom's meaning rather than translating "find" literally, which the English versions (BSB, SBLIBRE, RV1909) also follow by using "enough," "alcance," or "abasto." The Hebrew text itself never uses a vocabulary item meaning "sufficient" — that meaning is carried entirely by the idiomatic construction with matza.