Numbers 13:18

Summary

Numbers 13:18 instructs the scouts to observe the land itself and the people living in it, framed as a series of direct questions: what the land is like, and whether its inhabitants are strong or weak, few or many. The verse is built almost entirely from interrogative clauses attached to the verb "you will see."

Key words

• re'item ("you will see", H7200G) — qal sequential perfect, plural "you"; continues the narrative chain from the previous verse's command, functioning here as an instruction rather than a simple future.
• mah ("what?", H4100) — interrogative pronoun opening the first embedded question about the land's nature.
• hayyoshev ("dwells", H3427) — qal participle with article, describing the people not as a static noun but as those "currently dwelling" on the land.
• hechazak ("strong", H2389) — adjective prefixed with the interrogative particle he (H9008), opening a yes/no-style question.
• rav ("many", H7227A) — adjective closing the final alternative question, paired with im ("or", H0518A).

What the text says

The verse is structured as a chain of three questions following the main verb re'item. The first question, mah hi' ("what is it"), asks about the land's general character. The second concerns "the people who dwell on it" (ha'am hayyoshev aleiha), using a participle to mark the inhabitants as those presently occupying the territory rather than a fixed ethnic label. This second unit then branches into three paired alternatives, each introduced by an interrogative particle (he-, ha-, ha-) attached directly to an adjective or noun: "strong" (chazak) versus "feeble" (rapheh), and "few" (me'at) versus "many" (rav), the last pair joined by the particle im used here as "or" rather than "if."

Grammatically, the repeated interrogative prefixes (he/ha) attached directly to adjectives are a feature that translations render as separate question words ("is it... or..."), but in the Hebrew each pair forms a tightly bound rhetorical alternative rather than two independent questions. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) appears twice, marking both "the land" and "the people" as the objects of re'item, showing that seeing/inspecting applies equally to both.

Differences between versions

The LXX and Vulgate texts supplied for this reference correspond to content matching Numbers 13:17 (Moses sending the scouts and instructing them to go up through the region), not to the interrogative material found in the Hebrew of 13:18. No direct LXX or Vulgate rendering of the Hebrew text given here (the questions about strength, number, and the land's character) is present in the supplied full texts, so no word-level comparison can be made for this verse from that data.