Numbers 14:2

Summary

The verse reports that all the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation expressed a wish that they had died either in Egypt or in the wilderness rather than face their present situation. The complaint is framed with a repeated conditional wish-formula.

Key words

• va-yillonu ("and they grumbled", H3885B) — niphal narrative verb; the niphal stem here carries a passive/reflexive nuance, describing the people as undergoing or performing an act of complaint collectively, introduced by the narrative vav that advances the storyline.
• kol bene Yisra'el ("all the sons/people of Israel", H3605 + H1121G) — construct chain: kol ("all") governs bene Yisra'el ("sons of Israel"), marking the subject of the grumbling as the entire people without exception.
• ha-'edah ("the congregation", H5712) — feminine singular noun with definite article, referring to the assembled body as a collective unit distinct from, but overlapping with, "all the sons of Israel."
• lu ("if/would that", H3863) — a particle introducing an unreal or wished-for condition; it appears twice, framing the death-wish as a counterfactual expressing regret over survival rather than a real hypothesis about the future.
• matnu ("we died/we had died", H4191) — qal perfect, completed aspect, first person plural; used twice after lu, giving the sense "would that we had died," a fixed idiomatic pairing (lu...matnu) for expressing a wish about the past.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence divides into two narrative actions joined by the narrative vav: first, va-yillonu ("and they grumbled") with the subject kol bene Yisra'el ("all the sons of Israel") directed 'al Mosheh ve-'al Aharon ("against Moses and against Aaron"), using the preposition 'al twice to mark the target of complaint. Second, va-yomeru ("and they said") introduces direct speech from kol ha-'edah ("the whole congregation") to "them" ('alehem, referring back to Moses and Aaron).

The direct speech itself is structured as two parallel clauses, each built on the particle lu ("if/would that") followed by the qal perfect matnu ("we died"). This lu + perfect construction is grammatically a wish about unreal past — "would that we had died" — rather than a statement of fact or future intention. The parallelism contrasts two locations, be-'eretz Mitzrayim ("in the land of Egypt") and ba-midbar ha-zeh ("in this wilderness"), each closed by the repeated lu matnu, producing a rhetorical doubling that intensifies the wish rather than adding new information.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders lu-matnu with ophelon apethanomen ("would that we had died"), matching the counterfactual wish sense of the Hebrew lu construction. The Vulgate (VULCLEM) truncates the verse at dicentes ("saying"), omitting the direct speech content (the death-wish clauses) that is present in the Hebrew, LXX, and modern translations (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE).