Numbers 13:30

Summary

Caleb silences the people's murmuring before Moses and urges immediate action: he affirms with emphatic language that the Israelites should go up and take possession of the land, insisting that they are certainly able to overcome it.

Key words

• va-yahas ("he silenced", H2013) — hiphil narrative verb; the causative form indicates Caleb actively stops the people's speech, not merely quiets down.
• 'aloh na'aleh ("certainly we will go up", H5927G) — infinitive absolute + imperfect construction; the infinitive absolute before the finite verb intensifies the action, expressing strong resolve ("we will surely go up").
• yarashnu ("we will take possession of", H3423H) — sequential perfect (vav + perfect) continuing the verbal chain begun by the imperfect na'aleh, marking a logical/temporal sequence of actions.
• yakhol nukhal ("certainly we will prevail", H3201) — infinitive absolute + imperfect, same intensifying pattern as 'aloh na'aleh, underscoring certainty of victory.
• ki ("for", H3588A) — subordinating particle introducing the reason/justification for the preceding call to action.

What the text says

The verse opens with two narrative vav-verbs (va-yahas, va-yomer) that move the story forward: Caleb silences the people, then speaks. The hiphil form of yahas signals that Caleb causes the silence — it is an act performed upon the people's agitation, described in the preceding verses of the chapter (not part of this word list).

Caleb's speech itself is built on two paired infinitive-absolute-plus-imperfect constructions: 'aloh na'aleh ("we will surely go up") and yakhol nukhal ("we will surely prevail"). In Biblical Hebrew, doubling a verb root with an infinitive absolute before the finite form is a common way to intensify or emphasize certainty — something not automatically visible in translations that render it as a simple future ("we will go up," "we can conquer"). This repetition gives Caleb's statement a tone of forceful conviction that a plain English or Spanish translation flattens into ordinary future tense.

The clause ki-yakhol nukhal lah uses the particle ki ("for") to introduce Caleb's justification: the reason for going up and taking the land is the people's capability to overcome it. The pronominal suffix -ah ("her/it") on both otah (v.15-16) and lah (v.20-21) refers back to ha'am is incorrect—rather, it refers to the land (implied by prior context), a common grammatical gender agreement in Hebrew where "land" ('erets) is feminine.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text of this verse concerns Caleb silencing the people and urging them to go up and take the land. The Septuagint text provided (Swete) instead contains material describing the peoples inhabiting Canaan (Amalek, the Hittite, the Jebusite, etc.), and the Vulgate text provided similarly describes territorial habitation. These texts correspond to content found in Numbers 13:29 in the Hebrew versification, not to the Hebrew of 13:30 given here — reflecting a difference in verse numbering/alignment between the Hebrew Masoretic tradition and the Greek/Latin textual traditions as presented in this data.