Numbers 14:15

Summary

The verse continues Moses's speech to God, describing what will happen if the people are destroyed: the nations that have heard of Israel's God will speak. The Hebrew presents this through two sequential verbs describing the killing of the people and the subsequent speech of the nations.

Key words

• hematah ("you will put to death", H4191) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem emphasizes an act of causing death, not simply "dying."
• ke'ish 'echad ("like a person, one", H0376G + H0259) — an idiomatic phrase combining "person" and "one" to express totality or unity, commonly translated "as a single unit."
• shim'akha ("your report", H8088B, construct + 2ms suffix) — a construct noun meaning "report/fame/hearing," referring to what has reached other nations about the subject of the phrase.
• 'ame'ru ("they will say", H0559) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by hematah.
• le'mor ("saying", H0559, infinitive) — the standard infinitive construct used in Biblical Hebrew to introduce direct quotation, functioning almost like a colon before reported speech.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on two sequential perfect verbs joined by the narrative vav: hematah ("you will put to death") and 'ame'ru ("they will say"). This grammatical form (vav + perfect continuing a preceding verb) creates a chain of consequence — one action following from another — rather than presenting two independent statements. The conditional sense ("if you kill...") that appears in the English and Spanish translations is not marked by an explicit conditional particle within this verse itself; it is inherited from the structure of the surrounding speech (verse 14 and beyond), where this sequential chain follows an initial conditional clause.

The phrase ke'ish 'echad ("like one person") uses the numeral "one" ('echad, H0259) attributively with "person" ('ish, H0376G) to depict the people's destruction as a single, total event, treating the collective 'am ("people", H5971A) as though it were an individual entity. The construct phrase shim'akha ("report of you") ties the nations' knowledge to a specific reputation associated with the addressee, introduced by the relative 'asher ("which/who", H0834A) and completed by the infinitive le'mor, which formally opens the nations' quoted words in the following verse.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders hematah ("you will put to death") with ektripseis ("you will utterly destroy/wipe out"), a more intensive verb of annihilation than the Hebrew's causative "put to death." Where the Hebrew has shim'akha ("your report/fame", H8088B), the LXX has to onoma sou ("your name"), a related but distinct concept — reputation versus name. The Vulgate expands ha'am hazeh ("this people") into "tantam multitudinem" ("so great a multitude"), an addition of emphasis not present in the Hebrew noun phrase itself.