Numbers 11:33

Summary

The verse describes the moment the anger of Yehovah erupts against the people while they are still eating the meat they had craved: before it is even chewed, Yehovah's wrath is kindled, and he strikes the people with a very severe plague. The sentence links physical detail (meat still in the mouth) to divine punishment in immediate succession.

Key words

• ba.Sar ("meat", H1320) — the noun anchoring the whole clause, referring back to the quail meat the people had gathered.
• yikkaret ("it was chewed", H3772) — niphal (passive) imperfect of a root whose basic sense is "to cut off/cut down"; here it describes the meat not yet being "cut off" by chewing, i.e., not yet consumed.
• 'Af ("anger of", H0639) — construct noun literally meaning "nose", idiomatically "anger", bound to YHWH to form "the anger of Yehovah".
• chara ("it burned", H2734) — qal perfect, a completed action: the anger "burned" fully, marking the onset of the divine response.
• va-yakh ("and he struck", H5221) — hiphil narrative form (causative, with narrative vav) showing Yehovah as the direct causer of the strike, syntactically continuing the story after chara.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with a temporal clause built from ha.bashar ("the meat") plus odennu ("still, its continuing") and the construct chain bein shinnehem ("between their teeth"), followed by terem ("not yet") governing the niphal verb yikkaret. This niphal form places the meat as the grammatical subject of a passive/reflexive action — literally "it had not yet been cut off" — used here for the physical act of being chewed and swallowed. The temporal clause is immediately followed by a second clause introduced by ve-'Af YHWH chara, a construct phrase where "anger" ('Af) belongs to YHWH, and the qal perfect chara indicates that the anger's burning was already accomplished, not gradual. The narrative then shifts with va-yakh, a hiphil verb with the narrative vav that marks straightforward story continuation: Yehovah himself causes the striking. The double ba.'Am ("against/on the people") frames both the anger and the strike as directed at the same collective object, and the final noun phrase makkah rabbah me'od ("a plague, great, very") stacks the adjective rabbah and the intensifier me'od to underscore magnitude.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verb yikkaret (root "to cut off") is rendered in the LXXSWETE as ἐκλείπειν ("to fail, run out"), and in the Vulgate as nec defecerat ("had not failed/run out"). Both Greek and Latin shift the image from "cutting off by chewing" toward "the food running out," differing from the Hebrew's more literal sense tied to the act of chewing.