Numbers 12:9

Summary

The verse reports a two-part narrative action: Yehovah's anger "burns" against Miriam and Aaron, and then Yehovah departs. Both verbs are in the qal narrative form, marking sequential events in the story.

Key words

• yichar ("it burned", H2734) — qal narrative verb, 3rd person masculine singular; describes the anger as an event that "burns," a fientive verb rather than a static description.
• 'af ("nose/anger of", H0639) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linked to Yehovah; the construct form ties this noun directly to the following name, producing the idiom "the nose of Yehovah burned," i.e., his anger.
• Yehovah (H3068) — proper name, the grammatical subject of the possessive relationship with 'af.
• bam ("on them", H9003+H9038) — preposition with 3rd person masculine plural suffix, marking the object against whom the anger is directed.
• yelekh ("he went", H1980) — qal narrative verb, 3rd person masculine singular; the second sequential action, marking Yehovah's departure.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs, yichar ("it burned") and yelekh ("he went"), each introduced by the narrative va (H9001), which chains the clauses as sequential events: first the anger burns, then Yehovah departs. The grammatical subject of the first clause is not "Yehovah" directly but 'af ("nose/anger of"), a noun in construct with the divine name. This construct phrase is a fixed Hebrew idiom in which "the nose burns" expresses anger — the physical image underlying the abstract sense. The preposition ba ("in the") plus the suffix m ("them") in bam ("against them") specifies the target of this anger as a group (rendered "them," referring back to Aaron and Miriam in the wider context of the chapter, though the two verses given only show the pronoun).

The second clause, va-yelekh ("and he went"), has Yehovah implicitly as its subject, carried over from the previous clause, without repeating the name. The grammar therefore produces a compact two-event sequence: anger, then departure, both marked as completed narrative actions by the vav-consecutive construction.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the idiom with ὀργὴ θυμοῦ κυρίου ("wrath of anger of the Lord"), a double noun phrase (wrath + anger) that intensifies the emotional term but does not reproduce the "burning" verb yichar; it also lacks an explicit copula before ἐπ' αὐτοῖς ("upon them"), unlike the Hebrew's finite verb yichar. The Vulgate uses the participial construction Iratusque ("and having become angry"), turning the Hebrew's noun-based idiom ('af... charah, "the nose burned") into an adjectival/verbal description of Yehovah's state, rather than preserving the "burning" imagery of the source text.