Numbers 12:14

Summary

Yehovah answers Moses using an analogy: if a father had spat in his daughter's face, she would bear shame for seven days. Therefore Miriam is to be shut outside the camp for seven days, after which she may be brought back in.

Key words

• ya.Rok / ya.Rak ("certainly / he had spat", H3417) — the infinitive absolute ya.Rok followed by the perfect ya.Rak is a construction that intensifies the verb, emphasizing the hypothetical act of spitting as vivid and complete ("had he indeed spat").
• ti.ka.Lem ("will she be put to shame", H3637) — niphal imperfect, passive/reflexive, expressing an ongoing or resulting state of shame that she would experience, framed as a rhetorical question by the preceding interrogative particle ha (H9008).
• ti.sa.Ger ("she will be shut up", H5462) — niphal imperfect, passive, indicating that she will be confined; the subject is acted upon rather than acting.
• shiv.'At ya.Mim ("seven of days", H7651 + H3117G) — construct chain repeated twice, fixing the exact duration of both the hypothetical shame and the actual confinement.
• te.'a.Sef ("she will be received", H0622) — niphal imperfect, passive, describing her eventual re-admission, again framed passively rather than as her own action.

What the text says

The verse opens with the narrative verb va-i.Yo.mer ("and he said", H0559) introducing Yehovah's direct speech to Moses. The core of the statement is a conditional analogy built on the doubled verb form ya.Rok yarak ("he had indeed spat", H3417): the infinitive absolute reinforces the perfect verb, giving the image of spitting the maximal rhetorical weight. This hypothetical situation—a father spitting in his daughter's face—is followed by a rhetorical question marked by the interrogative particle ha (H9008) attached to the negation lo' ("not", H3808): "would she not be ashamed?" The verb ti.ka.Lem (H3637) is niphal, meaning the shame is something undergone, not enacted.

The consequence is expressed in three successive niphal imperfect verbs — ti.ka.Lem, ti.sa.Ger ("she will be shut up", H5462), and te.'a.Sef ("she will be received", H0622) — all passive in form. This grammatical pattern presents Miriam throughout as the object of action rather than an agent: she is shamed, shut out, and later gathered back in, all through passive constructions. The duration is marked twice by the construct phrase shiv.'At yamim ("seven of days", H7651 + H3117G), first for the hypothetical shame and then for the actual exclusion "from outside the camp" (mi-Chutz la-Machaneh).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the double Hebrew verb ya.Rok yarak with a participle plus finite verb (πτύων ἐνέπτυσεν, "spitting, he spat"), preserving the emphatic doubling through a different grammatical device. The Vulgate uses a subjunctive conditional (si pater ejus spuisset, "if her father had spat"), framing the analogy explicitly as a contrary-to-fact condition, which is implicit rather than grammatically marked in the Hebrew. The Vulgate also renders ti.ka.Lem as rubore suffundi ("to be overwhelmed with blush"), an idiomatic expansion beyond the more compact niphal of shame in the Hebrew.