Numbers 12:6

Summary

Yehovah instructs the audience to listen to his words, describing the normal way he communicates with a prophet: through a vision or a dream. The verse sets up a contrast that the following verses will use to distinguish Moses from other prophets.

Key words

• devarai ("my words", H1697G) — plural noun in construct with the 1st person suffix, "words of me," object of the imperative.
• nevi'akhem ("prophet of...your", H5030) — masculine singular noun in construct with the 2nd person plural suffix, literally "your prophet," here functioning to mean "a prophet among you."
• Yehovah (H3068G) — the divine name appears immediately after nevi'akhem, without a connecting preposition, creating ambiguity about its syntactic role (see below).
• etvada' ("I make myself known", H3045) — hithpael (reflexive) imperfect, 1st person: the subject acts upon himself, "I reveal myself," rather than a simple active "I know."
• adaber ("I speak", H1696G) — piel (intensive) imperfect, 1st person, contrasted with etvada': revelation through vision is described with a reflexive verb, communication through dream with an intensive verb of speech.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the narrative verb va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) followed by the imperative shim'u ("hear", H8085G) plus the particle na' ("please", H4994), softening the command. The core clause is conditional, marked by 'im ("if", H0518A): "if there is your-prophet." The construct form nevi'akhem attaches the 2nd person plural suffix directly to "prophet," which in Biblical Hebrew idiom can express a partitive sense — "a prophet among you" — rather than strict possession.

Immediately after this phrase stands Yehovah, with no preposition or conjunction linking it grammatically to nevi'akhem. This placement allows the name to function as the subject reasserting itself before the two following first-person verbs, etvada' ("I make myself known") and adaber ("I speak") — i.e., "your prophet [exists] — I, Yehovah, make myself known to him in the vision... I speak with him in the dream." The two means of divine communication are marked by parallel prepositional phrases: ba-mar'ah ("in the vision", H4759A, with article) and ba-chalom ("in the dream", H2472, with article), each governed by a different verb stem — hithpael for vision, piel for dream-speech.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew's juxtaposition of nevi'akhem and Yehovah without a connector is rendered differently across versions. The LXX gives κυρίῳ (dative), and the Vulgate gives "propheta Domini" (genitive), both effectively translating the phrase as "a prophet of/belonging to the Lord." BSB and SBLIBRE instead treat Yehovah as an appositional self-identification of the speaker before the verbs "reveal myself" / "speak," rendering "I, the LORD, will reveal Myself." The Hebrew word order supports either construal, since no preposition disambiguates the relationship.