Numbers 13:3

Summary

The verse narrates that Moses sent out the spies from the wilderness of Paran, acting on Yehovah's directive. It closes by identifying all of these men as heads of the Israelite tribes.

Key words

• va-yishlach ("and he sent", H7971G) — qal narrative verb with the vav that advances the story sequence; Moses is the grammatical subject performing the sending.
• mi-midbar ("from [the] wilderness of", H4057B) — construct noun with the preposition mi ("from", H9006), locating the point of departure as a specific place, further specified by Paran (H6290G).
• 'al-pi ("on [the] mouth of", H6310I / H5921A) — an idiomatic construct phrase using "mouth" to express the basis or authorization of the action, here attached to Yehovah (H3068G).
• kulam ("all of them", H3605) — construct noun with 3rd person plural suffix, totalizing the group described afterward.
• hemah ("they", H1992) — independent personal pronoun placed at the very end of the clause, giving emphatic closure to the identification of the men.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence opens with the narrative verb va-yishlach ("and he sent", H7971G), followed by the object marker 'otam ("them", H0853+H9038) and only then the subject Mosheh ("Moses", H4872). This word order — verb before subject — is typical of Hebrew narrative sequencing, where the vav-consecutive form pushes the action forward before naming who performed it. The phrase mi-midbar Paran specifies the geographic starting point of the sending, while 'al-pi Yehovah ("on the mouth of Yehovah") uses a construct expression built on peh ("mouth", H6310I) to indicate that the action rests on Yehovah's word or command — a common Hebrew idiom for authorization that does not literally mean speech was mouth-to-mouth.

The second half of the verse shifts from narrative report to a nominal, descriptive clause: kulam 'anashim rashei venei-Yisra'el hemah — literally "all of them, men, heads of the sons of Israel, they [were]." There is no verb "to be" in the Hebrew here; the identity of the men as tribal heads is asserted through a chain of construct nouns (rashei, "heads of", H7218H; venei, "sons of", H1121G) capped by the pronoun hemah at the end, which in Hebrew often serves to underline or restate the subject after a descriptive predicate.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate and LXX given here correspond to Numbers 13:2, containing Yehovah's command to send men to scout the land of Canaan, rather than to 13:3 itself. This makes it impossible to compare their rendering directly against the Hebrew text of 13:3 provided, since the Greek and Latin texts address a different verse in this dataset. The Spanish (RV1909, SBLIBRE) and English (BSB) translations of 13:3 render 'al-pi Yehovah variably as "conforme á la palabra de Jehová," "según el mandato de Yehová," and "at the consent of the LORD" — all interpretive expansions of the idiom "on the mouth of Yehovah."