Numbers 14:23

Summary

The verse states that the generation who spurned God will not see the land he swore to their ancestors. The Hebrew is built as two parallel negative statements about "seeing" the land, framed by an oath formula and closed by a pronoun referring back to the land itself.

Key words

• 'im ("if", H0518I) — a conditional particle here used in a Hebrew oath formula; in this construction "if they will see" functions as an implicit "they will surely not see," a common pattern in divine oaths.
• nishba'ti ("I swore", H7650) — niphal perfect, marking a completed act of swearing; the niphal stem is regularly used for this verb of oath-taking.
• mena'atzai ("[those who] have spurned me", H5006) — piel participle in construct with the 1st person suffix "me"; the piel stem gives an intensive or repeated sense ("those who kept spurning"), and the participle marks it as an ongoing characteristic of the group, not a single past act.
• lo' ("not", H3808) — a direct negation reinforcing the oath-implied negative of the first clause, making the second clause an explicit "they will not see."
• yir'uha ("they will see it", H7200G + H9034) — the same imperfect verb as in the opening clause, now carrying the feminine suffix "it," which grammatically points back to ha'aretz ("the land", H0776G), closing the verse with the same noun it began with.

What the text says

The verse divides into two balanced clauses. The first uses the oath particle 'im followed by an imperfect verb — a construction where the conditional form does not introduce a real condition but functions idiomatically as a strong negative oath ("they will surely not see the land"). The second clause restates this with an explicit negation, lo' + imperfect, describing specifically "all who spurned me" (mena'atzai), a piel participle in construct emphasizing a sustained disposition of contempt rather than one action. The final word of the verse, yir'uha, repeats the same root as the opening verb but attaches the feminine suffix "it," referring back to ha'aretz ("the land") named at the start — creating a structural loop that binds the whole verse to the single subject of "the land."

Differences between versions

The Hebrew's oath-formula construction ('im + imperfect, implying "surely not") is rendered by the LXX and Vulgate as a direct negative statement ("they will not see"), without preserving the grammatical shape of the oath idiom. Additionally, the LXX text supplied contains substantial material — about children present who do not know good or evil, to whom the land will be given — that has no corresponding word in the Hebrew word-by-word data for this verse.