Numbers 14:1

Summary

The verse describes the reaction of the Israelite community after receiving the report of the scouts: the whole congregation raised an outcry, and the people wept through the night. The Hebrew text uses three consecutive narrative verbs to build this scene of collective distress.

Key words

• ti.Sa' ("it lifted up", H5375N) — feminine singular qal verb, agreeing with edah ("congregation"), a feminine singular collective noun; it opens the idiom "to lift the voice."
• edah ("congregation", H5712) — feminine singular noun, the grammatical subject of the first verb, referring to the assembly as a single body.
• yi.te.Nu ("they gave forth", H5414M) — plural qal verb; the subject shifts from the singular collective edah to a plural "they," referring to the individuals within the congregation.
• qo.La ("voice", H6963H) — masculine singular noun in construct, paired with et (the object marker) and the suffix -m ("their"), forming the phrase "their voice."
• yiv.Ku ("they wept", H1058) — plural qal narrative verb, introducing a distinct action (weeping) after the outcry, with ha-am ("the people") as its subject.

What the text says

The sentence is built from three narrative verbs joined by the vav consecutive (va-), each advancing the action in sequence: tissa ("it lifted up"), yitnu ("they gave"), yivku ("they wept"). The first two verbs together form the idiomatic expression "to lift up the voice," split across two clauses: va-tissa kol ha-edah ("and all the congregation lifted up") and va-yitnu et qolam ("and they gave their voice"). Grammatically, this produces a shift in number — the verb tissa is feminine singular, agreeing with the collective noun edah, while the following verb yitnu is plural, treating the same group as multiple individual voices. This grammatical shift moves the reader from the image of a single unified body to that of many people crying out together.

The third verb, yivku ("they wept"), introduces a separate but related action, attributed to ha-am ("the people") rather than repeating edah. The temporal phrase ba-laylah ha-hu ("in that night") closes the verse, anchoring the weeping to a specific night without further elaboration in the Hebrew.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the two-part idiom as "ἀναλαβοῦσα... ἐνέδωκεν φωνῇ" ("having taken up... gave voice"), preserving a two-clause structure similar to the Hebrew, then adds "ὅλην τὴν νύκτα ἐκείνην" ("the whole night"), where the Hebrew simply has ba-laylah ha-hu ("in that night") without the qualifier "whole." The Vulgate compresses the Hebrew's three verbs into two: "vociferans omnis turba flevit" ("crying out, the whole crowd wept"), using a participle (vociferans) to fold the "lifting up" and "giving voice" into a single action tied grammatically to the weeping, rather than presenting them as three sequential narrative acts as the Hebrew does.