Numbers 13:26

Summary

The verse narrates the return of the scouts: they travel and arrive before Moses, Aaron, and the whole congregation of Israel at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran. There they deliver a report (davar, "word", H1697) to the whole assembly and show them the fruit of the land.

Key words

• yelekhu ("they went", H1980) — qal narrative verb, first in a chain of consecutive actions marking sequential events in the story.
• 'adat bene Yisra'el ("congregation of the sons of Israel") — a double construct chain ('edah + bene + Yisra'el), building a compact phrase meaning "the assembled community of Israel."
• Kadeshah ("toward Kadesh", H6946G + directional he) — the directional he attached to the place name indicates motion toward that location, reinforcing the verbs of arrival.
• yashivu ("they brought back", H7725G) — hiphil causative, indicating they caused a davar ("word/report") to return to the people, i.e., they delivered it.
• yar'um ("they showed them", H7200G) — hiphil causative with pronominal suffix "them" (H9038), meaning they caused the congregation to see the fruit.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as a chain of four narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — yelekhu, yavo'u, yashivu, yar'u — each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), which strings the actions in temporal sequence: they went, they came, they returned [a report], they showed. This chaining is a common feature of Hebrew narrative prose and gives the verse a rapid, sequential rhythm not always visible in translation.

The destination is expressed through a stack of prepositional phrases with 'el ("to", H0413): to Moses, to Aaron, to all the congregation, to the wilderness of Paran, toward Kadesh. The double object construction in the third clause is notable: yashivu takes two objects — "them" ('otam, referring to Moses/Aaron/leaders) and "a word," and separately "all the congregation" is marked with the object marker 'et (H0853), showing that the report was communicated to both the leadership and the wider assembly. The final clause repeats the causative hiphil pattern with yar'um, "they showed them," followed by 'et-peri ha'aretz, "the fruit of the land," using another construct chain (peri + ha'aretz) to specify what was displayed.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text of this verse describes the scouts' arrival, their report, and the showing of the fruit. The Septuagint text supplied here ("they returned from there, having scouted the land, after forty days") and the Vulgate ("the scouts of the land having returned after forty days, having gone around the whole region") instead correspond in content to what the Hebrew narrates in verse 25 — the return after forty days — rather than to the arrival-and-report content found in this Hebrew verse 26. This reflects a difference in verse division/content alignment between the Hebrew and the Greek/Latin traditions at this point in the chapter.